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With Penguin there are a lot of things you’re told not to do these days. Mainly, don’t use the old ways of generating links. I.e. don’t just ramp up the low quality, irrelevant link directories you used to use.

With all the great advice on what not to do, you might be left wondering what to do. Well here are some tips from Net66.

Focus on Your Content

Not technically link building as you’re not the one building the links, but if you spend time focussing on your content and making sure it’s as informative, entertaining and attractive as it can be, then people will naturally link to to. A la natural link building.

This could be anything from spending more time on your blog posts, to increasing the amount of content your website produces.

Guest Blogging

Now that the content on your own site is looking better, why not start looking to get your content published elsewhere via a guest post. But don’t think you can send one email out to hundreds of blogs and expect a good return. You can’t. Think of all the generic emails you get during the day, do you pay attention to them? Of course not, the same way no one will look at your generic email.

Take your time and read through their blog first. See if there’s anything on the blog you can speak to the webmaster about. If there’s anything you identify with or disagree with, bring that up when you contact them and start a dialogue. They’re much more likely to publish your writing this way.

These are just a SEO few tips but there are plenty of other ways to get good quality links to your site without resorting to black hat, unethical or poor techniques.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Over at SearchEngineLand, they’re running a series of interviews aimed at helping people with their SEO. Here’s a helpful video showing you what to look for when identifying and recovering from link penalties.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Adwords has long been known as PPC marketing. This means that your adverts can be displayed hundreds of times on Google, but, you only pay for your advert if somebody clicks on it.

A great idea. But now, that doesn’t seem to be working as well for Google. A lot of people have been talking about how Google’s revenues are down, and many people have speculated that a decrease in Adwords revenues is causing it.

Recently we’ve seen Google stop giving out search data to users of their analytics software, noting that you can still access the data on the Adwords interface. Many people said that this would push people over onto using Adwords just get this data.

But now, in a big refresh for Adwords, they allow you to purchase adverts that when you pay by viewable impression. Note here they say viewable impression. Ensuring that the end user will see your advert on screen before you’re charged.

Otherwise end users could load up a page where your advert is displayed at the bottom of the page. The user won’t see this advert unless they scroll far enough and if they don’t, even though the user hasn’t viewed your advert, you could still get charged as the loading of the advert could count as a “view”.

What do you think to these new changes? Leave a Reply below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It used to be that websites were pretty much all html, and were image sparse and mainly text. These days though with CSS becoming more advanced every day, there are more ways to add content to a page, and more ways to link out from that page.

Google had a guideline that stated there should be no more than 100 links on a page at any one time. So with these new developments in CSS, SEOs had to make sure that the link count for each page was under 100.

But now Google has removed that stipulation from their on-site guidelines. See what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the subject below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

This topic has been getting a lot of coverage consistently this year. Namely down to the fact that there have been some massive updates in the world of SEO this year. Penguin 2.0, the integration of Panda into the algorithm and, of course, the latest and biggest update Hummingbird.

This has effectively signalled the end for bad link building practices. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people still out there who practice these techniques. Lets take a look at which techniques to avoid.

Buying Links

You’d think this would go without saying these days but unfortunately this is still rife amongst SEOs. It’s seen as a quick win thing, and you might get some luck out of it. But Google will realise what you’ve done, and then you’ll be in an even worse position than when you started off.

Article Directories

These did actually help SEO at one point. Content was written and published to relevant sectors of article directories. Then came the spammers. Spun content and automatic submissions grew exponentially and Google had no choice but to ban or take manual action on some article directories. These days it would be surprising if Google took article directories seriously.

Low Quality Link Directories

As with article directories, you can still do this well. What you need is an industry specific, high quality, structured directory. You should upload accurate information about your company and avoid exact match anchor text. What you don’t want, is to hit hundreds of general link directories with exact match anchors. That will get you nowhere.

Are there any other techniques you would avoid using when link building?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Whenever SEOs gather for a chat, whether it be at a conference or, if we’re particularly lucky, a pub, you cannot escape the conversation without the pros, cons, reasons and rhymes for and against the use of meta tags.

The meta keywords attribute discussion has died down a fair bit with the universal opinion being: You do not need meta keywords tags and they’re a complete waste of time.

The other opinion, widely panned by observers of the first opinion, is that you do need them. Reason being: You don’t need skirting boards in a house, they do however mark the bottom of the wall, which is obvious. Yet it’s rare you come across a house without skirting boards in . In effect, it’s better to have it an not need it than need it and not have it.

Even though Google have said they don’t use the meta keywords tag for ranking, it’s still nice to have it there for structure etc.

The Meta Description tag however, is much more open to debate. Everyone agrees that you need them. Everyone agrees they should be unique. But not everyone agrees you should have them on every page.

Naturally you should add them to any important pages. But for all other pages on your website, should you have a unique meta description? A default one? Well, the question was put to Matt Cutts in the following:

“Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description?”

Matt’s answer below:

As you can see, there are some definitive answers there. First of all, no duplicates. Matt made that much clear, each meta description should be unique if present. Secondly, it’s better to have no meta description at all than a duplicate.

Finally, although you may have an auto generated snippet acting as your meta descriptions, which ensures unique content, if it doesn’t read well then you should re-write it manually. You have to put the user first here and make sure you’re helping them as much as possible by adding correct, legible content on your site.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Google have today announced measures that will block people searching for abusive images and in particular, child abuse images.

The don’t stop at just blocking searches though, they’ve taken action blocking thousands of videos and images that are known to contain abusive images.

The extent to which Google has committed themselves to this campaign is such that over 100,000 phrases related to abuse have been blocked. This has been coupled with the ability to “tag” known videos and images as duplicates of previously blocked material.

These changes directly affect Google’s search engines across the glove and in over 150 languages.

After growing unease and calls for the internet giant to do more, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt says “we’ve listened” and that’s the reason why these measures have been taken. He went on to say:

“We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.”

This all comes before Google’s meeting with the Prime Minister where representatives of Microsoft and BT will also be present.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Guest posting is a bit contentious at the minute. There are those who say it’s a great links back to your own site from relevant websites that’s really great for SEO. Especially if you can get keyword links from the site you’re posting on. It’s all natural and loved by Google.

Then there are those who are cynics and say that guest posting isn’t natural and you shouldn’t have keyword anchors on there as it’s spammy. There are even those who say it is spammy as a lot of people pay for guest posts making them paid follow links. Bad for SEO.

Whatever you think on the matter, here are some tips you can use so that you will have a better chance to add a guest post to someone else’s website.

Read Their Posts: You might be a great writer, but if you’re writing with a view that’s opposed to the website you will be publishing on, then you wont be able to publish a guest post on that site. For example, you talk to the owner of a forum who wants you to write a post. The forum owner encourages keywords in their reply signatures as it’s good for SEO and this is how they get traffic to their site. If you then write an article condemning spammy, over optimised anchor links in forum signatures, it might not get published (the might is sarcastic, you have close to no chance).  Maybe a bit of an extreme example, but you do need to make sure you’re reading the blogs you want to post on so that you’ll be able to further that website’s point.

Be Friendly: If you have a blog, you’ll probably get at least 2 emails a day from people asking to publish on your website. They’ll have a standard “Dear Website Owner, we’ve read your blog and would very much like to help contribute to the excellent writing on there”. Chances are, hundreds of other website owners got the same email and rather than smiling and enjoying such a glowing compliment, would be a bit more cynical and delete the email attributing it as spam. So send a personalised email, add some excerpts of blogs that you’ve read. Remember you’re emailing someone with a personality, so show off yours.

Follow these tips and you’ll be sure to see an increase in your guest post submission success rate.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

If you’re having trouble with your Google Authorship, you can see Net66’s how-to on adding Google authorship to you page. You can also use this handy infographic from Search Engine Land:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey