Do NOT spend your time in Reciprocal Links

I have been saying it for a while but I will yell it today. RECIPROCAL LINKING is DEAD!. Not only link exchanges are dead and will not produce any benefit to your site; it goes further as it may even land you in a hole with my man Mr. Google.

How did it work before? 

Before, reciprocal links used to work because search engines were not as smart. And as they developped their criterion for ranking at that time, they just saw a link as “a link” so it didn’t really matter, you were able to get the benefit of a link. The other and most logical explaination is that before search engines did not check for reciprocity in order to rank you. Again, they just calculated based on your link amount. As SEOers became aware of the value of a link, it became common to place an additional page called “LINKS” where reciprocity had it’s heaven. And heavnly it was…heavenly it was…

What will happen in 2008?

In 08′ search engines, lead by Google have evolved to become much smarter than before. Search engines are looking to give consumers reality and relevance, not vote competition. So Google, as it is all about offering contextual and relevant results is making sure that algoritms weed out importance and even penalize any page involved heavily in link reciprocity.   Tim Nash’s Article reviews how search engine relativity works and why google has that fancy algorithm to determine the context of a link.

What works now?

First, staying away from any link exchange, you will see how so many of those offering link communities start to disappear as we get into the end of the year. Some will remain in denial and continue to argue against the vast fact that link exchange is dead.

What works today is creating and building relationships with communities of web masters and writers who share some common intersts with you. Create your own circle of friends who are looking to share a common grown with you. Publish your pages and articles, share with them and ask them for an oppinion. Bookmark your articles in communities such as DIGG while befriending others who also want your opinion.

You can also continue to post blogs, articles and work on your content for relevance and substance. Today link building is more important than it will be in a few years. So evolve as the nature of the beast pushes you to it. Stay informed and ensure to know what gets you ranked while applying best practices.

Today’s bottom line is social media and collaboration. This will get you links, this will get you traffic and referrers. This is what you need to look for. BURRY THE EXCHANGE, IT DON’T WORK ANYMORE!

WordPress links pay off bigtime!

I recently wrote a detailed article at 9searches.org on how amazed I am of the power of the WordPress blog. Those who like to write can benefit from writing blogs on wordpress and get quality inbound links to their websites or other blogs. I have experieced some of my posts gaining a PR4 and PR3 weeks after posting. This is work that you cannot easily achieve yourself building inbound links.

 I believe it all has to do with the way blog posts interact with one another and how posts rotate around the different tags and categories. The exposure builds inbound links to the post which create PR that can partly be send to your pages using a link. I am trully amazed, I wrote details and recommendations on how to maximize your inbound blog link here: WordPress Links Translate Big Time

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Writing For Traffic – Content For Visitors

As many people look for easy ways to build traffic by applying black-hat seo practices, many seem to forget the importance of creating quality content. Who are we to fill the internet with garbage? creating adsense driven websites with nonsense content.

The truth is that the only stable and sticky way to produce targetted traffic (other than PPC) is by taking the time and the respect readers deserve of writing quality information. Traffic is the product of content, people and search engines want content for different reasons. As a case study, I wrote an interesting article about this topic. Here I discuss how a project I handled for a law firm turned into a 3-fold success with techniques targetted to build traffic in a short period of time.

The graph below shows how Google increased the crawling rate and indexed pages roughly within fifteen days of the articles being published and handled as we did. Read more here Writing For Traffic – Content For Visitors

 Google increasing crawling rate and indexing on our project

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What is this?Writing For Traffic – Content For Visitors | digg story

Using AIDA to Promote Your Site

Have you ever heard of AIDA?
AIDA is a method specifically used to guide visitors to take a specific action while they are looking at your marketed product. In general, marketing a website applies the same high-level concept of general marketing practices. Therefore applying AIDA to the structure of your site makes sense. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

Using the AIDA system will help anyone promoting a website create a structure based one the four items described above. Please keep in mind that this does not in any way relate a “physical” but more of a “logical” structure of how you position yourself while you create your site.

I wrote a more detailed article on AIDA applied to websites here Promoting your Site with a Structure. Please feel free to read on and use this concept.

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Writing Web Content Without SEO, What??

So I came across a very knowleageable individual at the Felician College here in New Jersey. He is a writer, but a classic true writer who knows how to spread his work and words on ink. We were talking about how the world has evolved and how most writers are concentrating on writing for the Web. We also discussed how writing for the Web differs widely from regular copywriting. One of his initial comments to my poking was “True writers make the best out of the internet without optimizing for Search Engines”

Ok, What? So I am thinking that everything I learned about SEO could just be a waste of time today. He said, “Not necessarily” and here is why?

When you focus on Writing For Your Target Audience without putting all your energy on SEO tricks, you can actually pick up ranking and traffic. His explaination was that if you write to please your readers as opposed to the search engines, you will ultimately gain the respect of others who read your articles. His idea is that search engines will index you anyway and your article will be found with random kewyords based on what you content holds. However he did say it was important to just apply one simple rule, and that is to let others know what your article is about by using a targeted keyword on your title and head line. This recommendation is based on letting your readers know what your content is about, not the search engines.

According to him, most of the basie SEO rules today are the same rules you apply when you write an article page on the newspaper or on different sections of a book. That is to use an appropriate, descriptive and focused headline for the content you are presenting.

Here are some of the comments highlighted from our conversation about Building Traffic Without SEO:

• “Kewyord repetition is not important to rank, even though it helps with search engines, it is hard to write an article while repeating the same keyword over and over again without losing sense and losing the interest of your readers”
• “When you write interesting and expert content, people will link to you, this will happen over time and creates a more permanent result in your position on the search results”
• “SEO geeks write content for the machine and not for the man”
• “Many of the sites I see rank the highest for a particular kewyord has not been optimized for SEO in the way best practices are followed”
• “Writing targeted content will automatically make you search engine friendly”
• “Write for your readers, write for your readers, write for your readers”

I gotta tell ya’ this was an interesting view, which made me really consider as to how important following all the tips and tricks on Search Engine Optimization is.

Feel free to visit my Writing For Your Target Audience article on this topic for further readings.

 What do you all think, Please feel free to coment.

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Web Writing – Use Your Writing Skills for SEO

Many believe that Search Engine Optimization is just about on-page criteria. Most only worry about Title Tags, Meta Information, and Kewyord Repetition within a specific body copy. The next step is then to go out and fetch as many incoming links as possible.

The problem with this is that many miss the importance of well written web content. Writing content for spiders will not keep your ranking and exposure long, it is a bubble and it bursts.

Believe it or not, one of the main components of off-page criteria search engines look at is how much time readers spend on a particular page of a site (individually and by page not by website). Which means that you may be assigned a temporary rank and generate search engine traffic to your website, but once Google finds your readers are bouncing off your pages like a ping-pong ball you are off the charts, out and back with the other billions of websites who don’t care about their readers. Don’t be one of them. On my guide to “Web Writing – Best Practices for Best Exposure” I give you all details on how to write well for the web. There is more than SEO when it comes to long-term relationships with search engines, take it into account. I have also written a very useful note on Writing For Your Target Audience.

Please feel free to shoot any comments on the above? 

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Social Bookmark Tool – Generating HTML For Icons

Alright, alright; I know that there are a ton of magical fancy wancy Social Bookmark tools you can find. I still however, wanted to extend my own simple version of a social bookmark icon tool. I took some time to write a Web tool that will give anyone interested, the ability generate an HTML code to display several of the most popular Social Bookmark Icons available today.

The idea of having social bookmarks on your page or article is to allow your readers to socially “tagg” what you have to say as one of their favorite readings, which in turn will help the author get their pages indexed quicker or simply increase link popularity.

This tool works by selecting the options you would like to extend to your readers, then typing a title and the URL of your article, blog or page. The HTML code will then be generated and a preview of the tool will be displayed for your convenience. I thought it would be useful for those who don’t want to deviate attention from the actual text into the fancy flashy icons available today. This tool is of course free and available to anyone who would like to try it and it is available here:

• Social Bookmarking Tool

The bookmark options will look something like this:
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Social Bookmarks – Great SE Indexing Tool

I have to admit that I am a little slow at caching up with all the new Web 2.0 features that have emerged during the past few years. However, now that I am paying more attention to the revolution, I am really amazed with what social bookmarks can do for my pages when it comes to getting indexed quicker by the search engines. Social bookmarks emerged in the context of allowing readers a centralized and global access to their favorite web material, but it has become more of a great tool for webmasters and SEO professionals than what it was intended for. Today, my fellow Webmasters and I all use social bookmark websites to accelerate search engine discovery-and indexing, and even to build link popularity.

In my personal experience, I have recently seen my articles indexed in a matter of 2 – 3 days, after observing the actual bookmark being indexed within 24 hours. This is when I came to the realization that social bookmarks are incredibly privileged when it comes to timely search engine crawling, and have been heavily implementing them since.

For all new Webmasters looking to exploit the benefits offered by Social Bookmarking or “tagging”, here is what I do after publishing my Web pages, articles and blogs:

1. Give readers the ability to bookmark my Web page site easily
2. Once I publish a page I then submit it to all Social Bookmark repositories I subscribe to (Furl, Digg, De.lici.ous, Reddit, NetVouz).
3. Email my article to all my friends and ask them to bookmark it as well

Following best SEO practices will help your site be ranked accordingly. I would love others to add value to my post by posting their comments on this topic.

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