• Backlinks. Backlinks is the term used to describe links that are incoming to a particular website. When a particular website has a higher number of incoming backlinks for specific keywords, it will be viewed as more relevant and important for those keywords by Google. Building backlinks is the key to building a good reputation for Google and online users. That is the simple explanation, and there are many more factors. The days of buying links to your page will definitely not work, and there is no way getting around good content to build authority for your website.
• Content and Blogs. The idea of a good blog is to provide good advice and share you expert knowledge with internet users. At the end of the day, the professionals who do this will be viewed as the best, whether it is by Google or not. At the same time, because of such high competition, companies are forced to put out content and place it around the internet. Since the Panda Update, the best option is to put that content online on sites that specialise in a particular relative topic. When those sites feel that content is appropriate or good enough, they will want to post it, backlinks included.
• Reading Content. This is where it gets tricky. When you are reading an article, the writer may be skilful enough to make you believe the content is genuine, and yet it is essentially a sales piece. This is the art of SEO writing, not just in terms of Google, but also in terms of writing for people. I am in this business, and I am impressed at how some articles and other content I read, actually just lead me to a sales pitch, after I was convinced.
• Decisions to Make. This is where we need to stop and think. Is the article genuine, and the content genuine, and it is backlinked to the appropriate site because of that, or is the article a genuine con, and it is backlinked to the appropriate site because of that? Useless articles that do not inform, or at least generate some debate will not work in terms of SEO anymore.

So admittedly, this article is written by someone who is involved in SEO (search engine optimisation). Do you think it is a con, or do you think it is genuine advice for you as a user to read between the lines when reading information on the internet? In this case, advice on how to analyse the intention of content you are reading on the internet.

Author Bio: Tom Mallet is an Australian freelance writer and journalist. He writes extensively in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the US. He’s published more than 500 articles about various topics, including SEO and search engine optimization.

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There are actually two stages involved in the new content requirements:

1. Search engine capabilities: The big search engines have done the internet a massive favor in upgrading their capabilities and getting rid of the horrendous spam-tagging which made searches so much fun for users. This has been a revolution, and a successful one. Businesses and website owners generally are now getting much higher values from searches, and the results are showing up in hard dollars.
2. Content control: The new regime in web content is delivering much better focus for websites. Searching content has achieved a lot, very quickly. This is essentially targeting, reducing the “garbage factor” which has been such a big turnoff for so long and sending searchers to sites they want, not just any old thing using tags. Blogs have been major beneficiaries of this approach.

Content and the market- Discretion is the better part of web hits stats

The internet is a market where anything can be a hit or a miss on the basis of a single click. Internet users are extremely picky, and what they’re prepared to use their time to do is the main issue affecting content. It’s an interesting point that even the time honored, if occasionally despised, “all pictures” approach to web content often doesn’t work.

Content really does mean commitment, and website owners generally are rapidly getting the message that if they want hits, they have to provide:

• Information value- News, in effect.
• Depth- More can be very much better in terms of content.
• Quality values- Happy snaps and gossip are definitely not in demand. Users want values which give them something, not babble.
• Fun- Boredom is not an option. It’s a form of slow suicide. Fun blends in with the other quality controls, and it’s expected in some form. Whether you have a comedian for a commentator or a lot of insider jokes for techs, “humanization” is the key to quality values in this area.

Blogs – internet canaries strike back

The toughest overall market online for content are blogs, where interest levels are truly critical. The blog owners, being naturally sensitive to quality issues, have been demanding- and getting- better standards of materials for some time, and it’s been paying off. Blogs often outsource and use guest posts, a positioning strategy in marketing terms, and they’ve been going from strength to strength with the new quality approach.

The moral of the story is “Quality or Death”. Quality has also been helping the blogs’ SEO values enormously, improving rankings through the new search capacities. The rest of the net is following the blogs, and the net is a better place as a result.

Author Bio: Tom Mallet is an Australian freelance writer and journalist. He writes extensively in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the US. He’s published more than 500 articles about various topics, including SEO and search engine optimization.

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There are several websites that invite ‘guest bloggers’ to submit blogs that will then become generally accessible.  That’s fine, but if you are going to take the time to create the blog and post it on the guest bloggers’ website, you should be doing that for a specific purpose, other than the satisfaction of seeing your creation on the internet.  Typical goals would be to generate free publicity and/or traffic for a website or to identify yourself as an authority on a specific topic.  You may have a long term goal in mind that your blog should become a source of income, presumably through advertising. For a successful venture of that type, the blog would have to become a truly authoritative source of information that would attract a large audience and that would justify the cost of the advertising to the sponsors.

Your blog should always include a page that identifies you and describes who you are and you should make sure that the page is easy to find.  Link back to previous blogs you have written, or otherwise reference some other content that you have created.  Quality guest blogs are trusted resources, especially those posted on the more well known blog sites.  If you specialize in a very specific subject area, make sure that the site you select has a focus on that area, that you speak with an authoritative voice, and that your writing is original.  Make sure that the tone of your blog is compatible with other postings and appropriate for your topic, having the right balance between formal and informal.  Carefully proofread your copy.  Check sentence structure as well as spelling, especially if you are not writing in your native language.  Thoroughly check your facts before posting the article.  Reference the sources of your information by linking to them.  If the topic you are discussing is at all controversial, be absolutely certain that your information is correct.  Once your article is live, your real work is just beginning.  You should be active in replying to readers’ comments and maintaining the pace of the discussion.  Be ready to follow up with another posting.

Assess the response to your article in terms of traffic generated, comments, etc., and determine if the article met your goals. If you are not entirely happy with it, decide how it could be improved, then be sure that your next article meets your expectations.

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1. Writing or buying as much content as possible. Most of the time he focus on quantity than on quality. A blog always need quality content. When writing or buying content for a blog, keep in mind that a visitor that come to your site to leave it after 10 seconds and not come it again brings no value. For a new blog it loses potential visitors and subscribers.
2. Getting as many links as possible, no matter what. The most used methods includes spamming forums with unrelated posts and leaving “Just want to say hello” comments on every blog they land. Forum postings and blog comments are are effective only when used to post relevant information and to build a brand to your online presence. Forums and Blogs are social tools and they should be used as such. They pass no page rank and the search engine reputation passed by them is 0 or very close to it.
3. Focusing on optimizing the blog instead of adding more quality content. This is what everyone does when he starts a blog. Everyone reads a lot of SEO related news and they try to optimize their blog. The result is that too much time is spent for optimizing a blog which contains little content, instead of spending it on adding more content.
4. Being a solitaire blogger. Focusing most of the time on adding quality content and optimization is not the best way to promote a blog. Every successful blogger is a very social blogger. The chance for a blog to compete with mammoth sites super optimized is to be a part of the blogosphere and to be promoted on social media. You can achieve it by linking to and being linked from other blogs, having a social profile on social media sites and building relations with other people.
5. Not focusing on the same niche. It’s hard to find all the time interesting topics on the same niche. Most of the bloggers are tempted to write something interesting even if is not related to their niche. This will make them to lose some subscribers and regular visitors who are interested in the blog niche but are disappointed that they have to read many unrelated articles.

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I know one thing was missing from this blog. Quality content. I started the blog several months ago because I thought it would be nice to play around a little bit, to see what a blog means and I was interested to learn new stuff about SEO. Now that I played enough with it I want to be more serious(but not too serious). I discovered a lot of things reading the forums, blogs and experimenting, and I’m prepared to discover new things which I’m going to share here. I’m not a SEO expert(yet), but I’ll try to discover the best techniques for having a successful blog and share them with you.

But before starting you have to think again if you are ready to learn new things, write quality content, and promote the blog and if you have the time for it. I’m not going to say that you need 1 or 10 hours daily or to make some recipes on how to have a successful blog in 61 steps. It’s up to you how much time you want to spend and this will help you have a successful blog sooner or later.

The most difficult part when you have a blog is to attract more and more visitors. Depending on how many visitors you have, you need to choose between different approaches for promoting it. If you have a blog with just a few visitors daily or if you don’t have any other visitor except yourself then you have to adopt specific techniques for promotion. If you already established a well-known blog you need to use other techniques. One thing you have to remember: in order to be successful any blog needs quality content. Quality content means unique content, useful and informative, easy to read and digest.

Before starting discovering the techniques to use for growing blogs we should take a look on the path every successful blog takes. We’ll start form point zero: the blog is started without content and visitors. First of all you need content, so you start to write it. Second of all you need visitors. We just identified the main ingredients of a successful blog: content and visitors. And we need a link between them: promotion through different channels. By promotion we should understand the way we can reach new potential visitors through various distribution channels.

As I said, for each blog you start, add content and identify channels through you can make it available to potential visitors. In order to make it a truly successful blog you have to reach the phase when content promotes your blog. Forget for the moment all the crappy techniques you can read in so many places about doing link building by yourself. Forget about directory submission, about submitting your link to 100 social bookmarking sites, about flooding blogs with comments and the list goes on. All you have to keep in mind is the golden rule: Once you reach a certain exposure your blog will promote itself through it’s content which is so unique, and hard to find that everyone will want to bookmark and share it.

The first stage is to reach a critical mass of visitors that when you add useful content will share it bringing you new visitors. It’s all about transforming your visitors in promoters of your blog. In order to reach that stage you have to: 1. write quality content, 2. have some relevant visitors to your niche who might find information on your blog useful. Those methods includes:

• relevant blog comments
• forums promotion through relevant posts and signatures, without spamming
• enroll with your blog to blog directories and blog communities like myboglog and blogcatalog

Using only the above mentioned techniques does not guarantees success. There is something more to understand. Think to your blog as a site competing with other sites. Your competing with large content sites like about.com, answers.com or online stores like amazon.com having a lot of content. They develop a lot of internal linking and have the sites super optimized for search engines. As a solitaire blogger you’ll never be able to compete with such abominations. Unless your not a solitaire blogger. I think this is the main reason for which only bloggers being very social can reach the top.

What being social means? Its hard to describe but easy to understand. Being a social blogger means to develop relations with other bloggers. Not because you have to but because you like what they write, it means writing about what trey write about, being generous with outgoing links, linking to what you like, without expecting them to link back.

You have to use blog comments like a social person, not like a spammer. Make your voice heard to bloggers you like by commenting on their blogs. They might read your blog and link back to you. Be active on forums and provide useful information to to other users. Again, be social, not spammer. When relevant and useful you can post a link of your blog. Enter to blog communities and make your voice known. Find other bloggers you like and develop relations to them.

I think this is the the recipe to bring the success:

1. write a critical mass of quality content
2. after the blog is started promote through various channels to reach new visitors, being social, without spamming.
3. establish a critical mass of relevant visitors who will promote your quality content by sharing and bookmarking it because is unique, useful and informative, easy to read and digest.

Those should be the goals and in the same time the means to achieve them. Let’s call it strategy and now we have to identify the tactics and techniques to action. As you noticed I didn’t mention seo techniques(the standard manipulation techniques of of the content, backlinks internal linking and so on), because those are not so important as the utility the blog brings to its readers.

This post is just the beginning of Blog Promotion series. All the techniques that will be described in the series will be applied on this blog. The effects and efficiency of the techniques can be measured in real time. When this post was published for the first time there were only 10 subscribers on this blog and less that 100 visitors daily. Further more the extension of the domain is .info. It is considered a SEO handicap by some folks. I consider it the opportunity to prove that it doesn’t really matter.

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What to do if you have a new blog having 1 visitor and you are that visitor. The chances to get backlinks are approximately 0, and every new visitor is important. I think in this situation posting on forums and commenting on relevant blogs worth it. But you have to keep in mind that nobody likes the spammers(not even other spammers), so it’s better not to be one and to follow a few rules:

• post only useful information, relevant to the forum/post you’re using
• try to use forums/posts in your niche
• be polite and don’t judge other people. If they say crappy things, don’t attack them, just combat what they say.
• if you don’t have something relevant and useful to say then don’t post.

After all keep in mind you promote more than a link site, you promote the brand of a website, and an online profile and you don’t want people to associate it with some spam. 

Forums Signatures

You should never relay on the reputation(link juice) given by the forum backlinks, even if the links are dofollow. Search engines developed complex algorithms and forum links have a pattern that is easy to detect and forums signatures backlinks have a low value.

Forums are great to bring targeted visitors and is better to use them wisely. Don’t post on each thread, try to add useful and documented information. A good post in a forum thread if much better than 10 spammy ones, if it’s informative and clarifies some doubts. People will spend more time reading it instead of skipping and the chances to land on your page are higher. After all “The Value of the Link is directly proportional to how hard it is to get, as mentioned in a post about forum signatures from nbridges media.

Blog Comments Blog comments in most of the cases are nofollow. It’s hard to find important blogs having dofollow comments. You can use specialized tools like  Fast Blog Finder. A small demo of how to use it is here.

The most important fact about blog commenting is that you can get noticed by other bloggers with high established blogs. If your blog is interesting they subscribe to it and they can add backlinks to what you post.

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Everyone wants to reach the first page of social bookmarking and social sharing sites. On the other side there are many people describing that being on first page of digg or similar sites don’t have long term effects.First of all, reaching the first page of an important social bookmarking site will bring a big crowd on your site, only for a few days. It will not result in a constant traffic for long periods of time, as a direct effect of being on the first page, but it might generate indirectly traffic on long term. A few guidelines should be taken in consideration.

Webpage Factors

When you reach the top on a SMB the webpage will be noticed by the crowd. This is not enough if you want more than many visitors for a few days.

• The page must be really useful to make the visitors come back to the site and convince them that it’s something that deserves to be shared to the community. The page should contain useful content that is hard to find or unique.

Website Factors

When you reach the top on a SMB the site will be noticed by the crowd. To benefit on long term you must ensure that the visitors will remember it:

• the entire site have relevant and useful content.
• the similar content should be visible, observable and accessible to the user in a matter of seconds. The pages where the visitors might roam directly from the landing page should be relevant to what they are looking for.
• the layout and design of the site of the site is crucial, even more important than the content. The first impression matters, and if the first impression is not good there might not be a second one. The site should look simple and clean to be understandable from a single look.
• the site should be brandable with a visible logo. When visitors land for the first time to your site, they should feel it’s unique. If you don’t want to buy a unique theme then you should use one which is not very popular in your blog niche.
• have accessible social bookmarking and sharing buttons for more sites. Once a page reach the top in one SMB other will follow. It’s better for the visitors to have an accessible way to vote one page on other social media sites.

RSS and email subscribers

Depending on how good you content is a percent of the visitors might subscribe by rss or email. A few techniques will increase the percent of visitors subscribing:

• have a visible rss button
• have a visible subscribe by email controls
• have a regularly updated site, but not to “regularly ” – I personally avoid blogs having too many posts, but I read that users like blogs updated regularly. From my point of view I’m not annoyed and I don’t unsubscribe from a blog having a post per month but I avoid those filling my reader with many irrelevant posts daily.

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• BlogCatalog – is the one I like the most, it has a good design and can generate a little traffic to your wesite. It is more than a simple directory, it tries to add a little social spice to the classic directory recipe. It publishes also the RSS feeds and has PR5. Adding your blog to it requires ownership verification. This is done by embedding a small image in your homepage. One the site is verified, the image can be removed, but keeping it will provide some advantages: the statistical information and the probably the internal rating of the blog based on it.
• Blogged.com – is a PR7 blog directory, where you can add your blog without having to embed some widget in your code. The blog is reviewed in 1-3 working days by a reviewer who rate the blog when approving it. Like for blogcatalog.com blogged requires the verification of the blog ownership by embedding a image in your blog homepage which can be removed after. The blog is still listed without an known author if it’s not verified. Blogged.com also uses the RSS feeds to aggregate the blog content.
• Technorati – is not a blog directory in the classic way, it’s a blog search engine, indexing 112 millions blog(source). However you can use it to add your profile there and to make sure your blog is indexed.
• GlobeOfBlogs.com – a PR7 directory.
• BlogTopList – a blog PR6 directory containing a lot of blogs. It does not contain a direct link to your blog(the link is redirected).
• Bloggapedia.com – a PR 5 blog combined with a blog search engine.
• Blogarama.com – a PR4 blog directory started in 2002.
• Bloggernity.com – a PR4 blog search directory with a simple interface.
• BlogSearchEngine.com – A nice looking directory and search engine blog, PR3.
• TopBlogArea.com – A PR3 blog directory.
• BlogListing.net – A PR3 Directory powered by phplinkdirectory.

Other Blog Directories:

• TopBlogging – just another PR0 blog directory. It does not have something special just the usual stuff and its PR is not very encouraging.
• Other blog directories: BlogFlux.com, FeedBoy.com.

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• White Hat Seo -the techniques falling in this category assumes building unique, quality and organic content, don’t uses linking schemes that increase artificially the rank of the website and links out to other useful sites without expecting any favors in return. This type of techniques provides good and healthy rank which does not decrease in time, and is based primary on the quality and utility of the site.
• Black Hat Seo -
  • This is what we can call the most Unethical Seo Techniques. Usually the techniques falling in this category consist in duplicate content, generated content to look unique, incoming links created with the help of scripts and bots in blogs comments, forums, wikis, social bookmarking sites, …
  • The techniques assumes getting visitors asap before having the site banned. Sites are replicated easy using scripts to replace those getting banned.
  • Usually Search engines detect most of those unethical campaigns and don’t increase the rank of the page or even worth it adds penalties for the site or even ban it. There are constant improvements done in search engines to detect black hat seo campaigns on one side and constant improvements in in black hat seo campaigns to remain undetected and unpenalized.
• Grey Hat Seo -
  • Assumes building sites not necessary quality oriented, to get as many visitors as possible without applying techniques which might get the site penalized or banned.
  • Content is not generated, it is unique but with a low quality and the growth of the site if targeted on adding a large number of articles, many of them redundant. Linking campaigns consist in getting any incoming link no matter from where it comes, link exchanging, …
  • Most of Seo techniques falls in Gray Hat Seo category because they are abused.

In simple words White Hat consists in adding value to your site and relying mostly on quality to grow it in search engines. Black Hat is the next thing that will be detected an banned by the search engines tomorrow, but it still works today. Grey Hat consists applying safe techniques to improve the raking in search engines and not get penalties from search engines. The rank will decrease when the techniques are not applied anymore.

It’s obvious that white hat represents ethical seo and black hat unethical. The problem is how to categorize the gray one. I think any action that add value to the user is a good one and sustain a ethical seo and those which are not, don’t.

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