Manual Links and Hard Work But Worth It

Recommended tools to get you started

Market Samurai

Sometimes you just have to break down and do some work if you want your site to optimize. Everyone is looking for the latest tool or trick to get links back to their site but there is just no substitute for good old fashion manual labor. Google can see through all the tricks.

Start with Market Samurai

It is very difficult to determine where is the best place to get your hands dirty when it comes to blogging. You will need a few tools to help you. We highly recommend Market Samurai and Dofollow Diver.

Marketing Samurai is a great tool that helps you figure our which are the highest converting least competitive keywords. It then helps you find where similar content is located on the web and gives you vital information about a target website’s page that helps you determine if it is valuable or not for your optimization when it comes to blogging on it.

Nofollow links hurt your optimization

Getting too many links with the code attribute “nofollow” is generally believed to be harmful to your optimization. The main feature that exists in Dofollow Diver and many similar types of tools have what we call “dofollow detection.” There is no such tag in html as dofollow. It is either nofollow or not. These tools really just look for blog pages that do not have nofollow tags put on their outgoing links and allow you to sort them by page rank.

Tools that highlight nofollow links

This can get kind of tricky but if you have a Firefox add on like Search Status or SEO Quake you can enable the “highlight nofollow links” feature. This will cause a pinkish orange color to surround links with the nofollow attribute. This allows you to quickly scan a page too see if the webmaster has nofollow attributes assigned to links in comments. This saves time and money.

Search engines look for natural patterns

If all that your site had was dofollow links exclusively then that could raise some red flags with the search engines. There is some speculation that Yahoo and MSN give a small amount of SEO credit for nofollow links. Google claims they ignore them altogether. We have previously proven through testing that search engines make exceptions for Yahoo Video, AOL Video, Google Video and Youtube Videos.

Nofollow links still have value

Every site that naturally optimizes has nofollow links. When you are manually creating links and you do not want to pass up a good link page then don’t stress on it. Getting links that bring real visitors is worth it in any event. Traffic also plays a roll in optimization. High page rank pages that have many links to them and lots of traffic are valuable regardless of whether they have the nofollow attribute or not.

Targeted links are far better than generic

One of the toughest issues when building a linking strategy is keeping your links coming from relevant pages on the net. It is very hard to only get links from pages that are similar in content to your own. The major temptation is to just get links from anywhere. It costs the same amount of time so don’t waste it.

Search engine ranking depends on amount of links

If you have 100 links to a page from highly relevant pages and your competition has 200 links but only 50 are relevant, who will out rank the other? In contrast to the intent of search engines the page with 200 links will. Although it will cost them twice as much in time and effort. If you both spend the same and get the same amount of back links then the most relevant links will prevail.

Relevancy can be an indicator of authority and trust

The more non relevant links you have the higher the risk of your site looking like a link spam site. You can artificially inflate your Page Rank but you will be penalized in the actual search result rankings. Many are obsessed with page rank and that has dragged them down into the abyss of not being relevant to Google’s users. If you are not on the first page of search results you don’t really exist.

The link equity of your website matters most

The ratio of dofollow links to nofollow links and the ratio between relevant links and off topic links equals your site’s or that specific web page’s “link equity.” If your site is considered an authority on a topic it will have less spammy nofollow links. The search engines know this and they reward sites that don’t fall into the mass link addiction.

Manual linking is easiest and most productive

Creating back links to your own site is time consuming and many times tedious. Many fall into the trap of repeating comments on many blogs all over the net. The more unique the text is surrounding your link the more SEO juice that link will pass. Besides, the more spammy your links the less likely they are to get approved by the comment moderators. This wastes time and money.

Is more than one link per post okay?

Don’t ever have more than 1 link in 1 post. We can’t emphasize that enough. Most blogs automatically put all comments with more than one link under manual review. This will cause your approval rate to go way down and that wastes your time and time, again, is money.

Should I use clever keyword insertion in my comment name?

Do not use keywords in your name unless the blog doesn’t allow text links in the comments themselves. We tried this a million times.

Comment by: “SEO Link Strategies”

Blah BLah the comment paragraphs.

This would pass a lot of SEO juice but the problem is the comment moderators usually don’t allow “SEO names” and will delete your posts. They don’t have a title tag either in most cases. This strategy should be only used for blogs that allow name links but strip out all links from the comment area itself. Look at the previous posts on the page and check to see of the links are clickable. If not then you know which strategy to use.

Comment text links with title attributes are best

Sites that allow text links in comments are great for SEO. When you find a great dofollow blog like this do not abuse it or waste it. Use the author name that you pen under on your blog as your name or some other normal sounding name. It is better not to have a name link at all, but if you feel you must, just link to your authors profile on your blog, or to a professional writers account at ezinearticles.com or a social profile.

Example of proper comment text link

“Comment by: David”

This doesn’t pass any SEO value but a text link in the body does like:

“Comment: Blah Blah Blah a couple of paragraphs, with your keywords at least in them twice, discussing whatever is being discussed on the page. Click here to read more about search engine optimizaiton. Blah Blah Blah some more sentences to wrap up your comment with one keyword.”

Avoid diluting the link equity of your text links

Notice that “David” is not a link like in the example above it. If you can you only want one relevant text link going to your site without your name being a link which points to the source of the text link as the author. The more links you have on a post, page, or in a comment the less Page Rank or SEO juice each link passes.

Don’t cut your own throat by getting greedy

If “David” was a link then it would cut the value of the text link “search engine optimization” link by half. Page rank flow is divided by the number of outbound dofollow links. Don’t dilute your link equity by getting greedy for links. Many webmasters and bloggers cut their own throats by devaluing their text links in this manner.

Attracting Links from High Ranking Websites

It is not easy to attract links from high ranking websites. Knowing that, you could devise ways to cheat and get them or, you can use that same mental energy to try and come up with clever ways to create organic or naturally high ranking links to your site.

High ranking news links from press releases work

Attraction Marketing 2.0

Getting in the news is the number one way to get high ranking links quickly. There are a million ways to get into the news and paid press releases should not be below your standards. A paid press release about something newsworthy is great link bait.

Most people just release massive amounts of press releases that are full of keyword links. They are mistakenly thinking that they will get those links on high ranking pages. That is rarely the case and they may have wasted their shot at getting the press to trust them.

There is nothing more sweet than getting reporters and news bloggers on your side. Help them with their site and their carrier if you want to make friends with them. Be the opposite of selfish and you will be rewarded.

Free high ranking links with press releases

Press releases are nothing more than simple announcements or information releases that should be geared toward convincing someone working in the press that your content is newsworthy. Put something that reporters and news annalists would think their readers would like on your site. Do something unique that will interest people who work in the press and media and then notify them about it. See this article on creating the right type of content.

You many only have one shot with press releases

Don’t let your site get put on the press release spam list. Getting your site ignored by the press is a giant mistake that you may never recover from. High page rank links cost a lot of money or require too much time to get manually. Press releases done correctly are the cheapest way to get high page rank links back to your site. Search engines pay very close attention to high ranking news links. See this article for more information on creating back links manually.

High ranking news links can fast forward optimization

High ranking news links have been proven to catapult websites into the lime light. One great link can bring much more than one vote with it. Keep in mind that there are thousands of websites harvesting (sometimes stealing) content from news websites. Some of these content harvesting sites also have high page rank themselves. Every site that harvests the high ranking link to your site will also give you back-links. Done right this can bring in wild home runs. Many times this can be done by releasing high quality videos.

Get video on your site and don’t get slammed for cheating

Video is a great way to attract links. Video is so easy to create that kids in basements are producing top quality ads and commercials. Just look at who is dominating Youtube viewership. Video software is free or dirt cheap and there are a large number of free photos and video clips on the net to select from. Put it all together and you have a newsworthy video that reporters or news websites might like to link to. Some accomplish this through humor, tragedy or just ingenuity. Make sure your keywords are in the audio of your videos.

Video audio indexing is affecting ranking

Video is getting indexed by the search engines so now is the time to jump on this train. Audio is now being specifically indexed as text clips and will start having a larger impact on search engine rankings very soon. See examples here. Everyone who invested heavily in fake videos and videos with no audio are already regretting it now that their videos have stopped bring them ranking and visitors. Video spam does not work anymore if it ever really did.

Comment on newsworthy current events

Interesting commentary on the news is another great way to get traffic and links. When you speak for or against a news article or opinion, that other author may find your article and link to it with his or her answer to your article. This can be accomplished with ping back although in a less powerful way. When someone searches for that authors name or that specific article or even the website that hosts that article, you can optimize your articles to come up just under theirs in search results.

News sites like to link to statistical data

Statistical information that reporters find trustworthy is a great source of ongoing links. Getting a few reporters or news article writers to trust your site as a source of reliable information is the sweet spot when it comes to getting free links that have earthquake like effects on your own sites rankings. Make your site an authority on a specific subject and write articles every day. Once you have great content you need to bring that content to the attention of people who can bring you optimization in the form of back links to your articles. Read these articles on the general strategies for bringing back links for optimization.

Reviews bring back links and traffic

Reviews of anything will bring links. If you establish your content as being as good as any other expert on whatever your site is about then your reviews will gain respect. If company “A” has a hypothetical page rank of 7 and links to your article, that will have a major affect on your pages ranking. If your review is a valuable way for that site to market their product or service there is a good chance they will link to your article in an attempt to show proof to their customers that others are speaking well of whatever they are selling. See an example of an optimization review of seochat.com.

Research the types of sites that will bring you high page rank links

There are thousands of different ways to create link bait and attract high ranking links to your site. Make sure you have a target in mind which means you have already researched the potential optimization that links will bring your site. Make sure your site will benefit in SEO more than it would if you just bought ad space on a site. Buying links will work for temporary ranking but the cost keeps going forever and search engines know whether a link is natural or not. Read for more information on search engine optimization.

Don’t waste your own page rank with outbound links

When you write a review or link to another site, make sure you use the “nofollow” attribute tag for outgoing links. If you are using Wordpress this comes auto installed so you don’t have to worry about it. It is important that you do not send your optimization juice to others outside of your site. Link to other pages of your site with keyword text and do not use the nofollow attribute and it will pass the page rank of all incomming links to that page to your other internal targeted pages. Click to see more more on internal site linking strategies.

Link Building Strategies

Link building is the number one priority for any person who wants to make a website successful once your content is basically completed. You always want continuously new and updated content but the quality and quantity of the links to your site will determine its success online.

Easy way to begin your link building campaign

Link Optimization

The easiest way to begin a link building strategy is to blog on other websites like yours. You want sites with high Google Page Rank to link to yours and therefore research is crucial. Find an online tool that helps you determine page rank.

The Google toolbar will do at minimum for displaying the page rank of any site you are looking at. We suggest using Firefox with a search engine optimization tool like SeoQuake. It will show you the age of the website, the page rank and importantly the number of links that site has to it and even the number of links to the page you are thinking of commenting on.

We also suggest using marketsamuarai.com and “dofollow diver.” All these tools show the “authority” of the page you are looking at. That way you don’t waste time blogging on the wrong type of websites.

Warning about most SEO browser tools

Be careful with these tools though. Google and Yahoo see most browser SEO toolbar that do mass amounts of automatic information requests as a possible virus or spyware. Usually you can only use it once a day with Yahoo before they block your IP address for the day. Google will let you use it several times before they start asking you to insert the captcha codes to make sure you are a human. MSN never blocks it as far as we have experienced.

Do not waste your time on links with zero SEO juice

Don’t waste your time on sites that will not pass any SEO juice to your own site. The higher the number of worthless links you have to your site the less your other links will be effective. Search Status is a good Firefox plugin that you can add to your browser.

It has a setting that allows you to know not just the page rank but also the Alexa ranking which is the overall traffic rank. The lower the Alexa rank the higher the sites traffic. It will also show you the Compete rank which can help. The main thing you want though is to enable the “highlight nofollow links” feature.

Nofollow links and how they could hurt your ranking

Nofollow links are links that are specifically coded to tell search engines that it is a low valued link. Search engines do not give your site as much SEO juice for these type of links that are coded with nofollow. Hopefully you can see the advantage of being able to go to a site and immediately see that all the links in the blog comments are nofollow links. This will help you focus energy and time commenting on pages that will benefit you the most in exchange for the amount of time it takes to write a healthy comment.

Reciprocal link exchanges can help your site

Now you are pointed in the direction of blogging on other sites that have dofollow links. While you are there on that site, and likely logged in, you might as well click the “contact us” button and send them a message that you are interested in doing a content exchange or reciprocal link exchange. Explain the uniqueness of the content you can provide for their site. Odds are only 1 out of 100 will respond positively. Even so, it is well worth the effort.

Resist the lazy man’s temptation to resort to spamming

Keep away from the temptation to spam their site. It is usually the same comment moderator for every section of the site. If they see you posted the same comment multiple times anywhere on their site, or even another site they control, it would be stupid for them not to delete your comments. There goes your links! Make sure that you do not create situations where you make a webmaster or website moderator have to chose between deleting you or being stupid. No one will chose the stupid option.

Which pages on your site should you link to?

Many also make the mistake of pointing all there links straight at there home page or the home page of their blog. The search engines look for patterns of natural linking and unnatural linking. If you were at Google and you were doing a manual review of sites and one site had 1,000 links, but most of them were pointing straight at the home page from blog comments, would you put that site on the first page of Google? Not likely.

What is a good ratio for home page linking?

Link 2/3rds of you incoming links to content in your site that is not on your home page. If you are blogging on a site talking about “Search Engine Optimization” then point your comment link to your page that discusses “Search Engine Optimization” or a very similar topic. Google scans your whole page and the page you are linking from and makes an associative analysis. It grades that link based on the content relevancy of the two pages.

Use bookmarking code to associate keywords with your domain name

Another option for home page linking is putting bookmarking links inside you page. So let’s say you want to optimize your home page for more than one keyword phrase. Put the “name” attribute in the code of a section of your site naming that section. Example we could place the code:

<p><a name=”search_engine_optimization”>EXAMPLE CONTENT SECTION</a</p>

as a bookmark tag inside the code of our home page section that talks about that subject. Then when I link to my home page I can link to http://optimizationtutor.com#search_engine_optimization (NOT OUR REAL HOME PAGE). This makes those keywords become associated with the content of that page. If someone clicks that link it will auto scroll down the page and focus the browser on that section of content. Those keywords better be in that content section or this will hurt you with the search engines.

Warning about url bookmarking

It is widely believed that bookmaking codes in url’s and other types of url structures are ignored by Google. We have found several instances where we click on a Google search result and it takes us to a section of a page that is far from the top. Other times comment structures are similar and Google may provide that comment link in search results. So for our purposes here we believe that bookmarked sections of a page is should be part of any SEO campaign.

Internal site linking is vital to keyword association

Internal site linking is vital. In every post  on your site you should have keyword links to other posts on your blog. There are Wordpress plugins that do this automatically for you but we have found that they can slow down your site. If you are talking about “link building strategies” as we are here when you mention another keyword or talk about another subject covered more thoroughly in another section of your site like “Marketing Strategies” then link to it.