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Your site’s link profile: learn how to get high-quality and diverse links

So much has been said about link building that reading every new article is like learning all over again that the grass is green and the sky is blue. However, some things need more accurate definition. You are usually told that nearly all links are important, and the more you get, the better. It’s not exactly true.

Search engines treat your incoming links as natural and do not suspect you of buying links if your link profile is diverse (i.e. you have links from different sites that are relevant to yours). Dofollow, one-way links from thematically close but new and relatively small sites, might be as useful as links from older and larger authoritative multipage sites. Especially valuable are in-content links with keyword-rich anchor text.

10 ways to diversify your links for the sake of long-term ranking

1. Start a Squidoo Lens on your topic.
   Create unique quality content, use appropriate keywords and link to your site. You will then have relevant dofollow links from a site that search engines like.
2. Comment on dofollow blogs.
   There are some blogs that have removed the “nofollow” tag on their comments. Most of them are, of course, moderated, so add only valuable and useful comments.
   Here are some places to find such blogs:
   Comment Hunt
   DoFollow Blogs
   Courtney Tuttle DoFollow blogs
   InlineSEO
3. Become a guest blogger.
   Who knows more about your products than you do? Write a blog post on the theme of your expertise and suggest it to big blogs in your niche. Even if you can’t make text links to your site in an article, still quite effective because your author link at least points there, and you will start gaining some reputation and visitors.
4. Write testimonials.
   Offer webmasters or software vendors testimonials on their products or services that you use. Usually a link to your site will be a polite response in exchange for the testimonial.
5. Contribute to wikis.
   The largest known wiki is Wikipedia, where you can add information about your site where it is appropriate. Remember, you should provide information, not advertising. Look for wikis that are related to your website and mention your site as an external resource – if it improves reader experience.
6. Post press releases.
   Use press release distribution services; hundreds of press release websites will list press releases inexpensively or even free of charge and include keyword-rich anchored links back to your website.
   Here are some such services:
   PRLog
   OpenPR
   PR.com
   I-newswire
7. Submit your site to relevant directories.
   Yes, it sounds old-school in the age of social media, but links from niche people-edited directories are still valuable. Besides, even if these links do not greatly increase your rankings, they will bring you targeted, highly relevant traffic.
8. Submit articles to article directories.
   Try writing unique articles with your keywords and link them to your site, then submit these articles to article directories (use the Web CEO Submission tool to take advantage of the most popular ones).
9. Take part in Yahoo Answers.
   Where appropriate, respond to questions on Yahoo Answers and add a link to your site as an external resource to get more information on the topic.
10. Use social media.
    Add social bookmarks icons to your articles and remember to submit your texts to social media sites. If your content appeals to social media users and becomes popular on one or more high-traffic social sites, your site will be linked to from numerous sites around the Web, beyond the original social sites you have submitted it to.

[A few SEO MixTour issues will discuss social media link building and optimization. Do not miss them!]

And remember, links are not only a way to increase your search engine rankings; they are a great way of attracting new targeted traffic that is converted into buyers. That is what you want, isn’t it?

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for April 2009.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors. Learn more about the formula.

Quality Vs Quantity

Quality text links could prove beneficial in the long term. Practitioners and website owners scampering to generate as many inbound links by resorting to link farms or making irrelevant forum and blog posts. Prioritizing the quantity of links over quality may indeed drive huge traffic to your website at a point in time but it does not guarantee audience loyalty.

Amaan Goyal
CEO & Founder of Greymindz LLC

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A Flash In The Night: How To Light Up Your Website

As a site-building technology, Flash is hot because it offers visitors the smart and beautiful content presentation and interactivity that everybody wants to see. The reverse of the coin is that the Flash code is still insuperable for search engine robots and they are not as good at getting your Flash website indexed as the pure HTML sites are.

The good news is in the past few years search engines have made a breakthrough in Flash indexation. Google can now read SWF files of all kinds, including Flash, in buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites with their content, and extract URLs embedded in Flash.

Adobe in its “SWF searchability FAQ” says they are “working not only with Google but Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. Google is using the optimized Adobe Flash Player technology now, so users will immediately see improved search results. As Google spiders index more SWF content, search results will continue to get better”.

MSN/Live/Bing has been developing its own format, Silverlight, to compete with Flash, so Microsoft is unlikely to develop the toolset to read Flash files.
While waiting for the news from the major search engines, you may have your Flash site indexed and ranked by all search engines.

• If you are trying to choose a site-building technology, the most popular strategy is to build an (X)HTML site that uses textual content along with other technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and Flash instead of including everything in a single Flash file.
• If your site is already built in pure Flash, and you just want to optimize the content, the problem is that you will have only one page anyway. The disadvantage of such sites is that there isn’t a page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles. As a solution, you can create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash “page” and install the Flash movie on each HTML page.
• Google can’t discover and index textual content written on images, so don’t put any there. Instead, add your texts directly into the Flash file. This way Google will discover and index it.
• Get more inbound links to your site. This will raise your ranking in major search engines. Pay attention to the keywords used in link text, they should correlate with your site keyword profile, mainly TITLE and META tags (these tags are vital for Flash sites) of the pages that the links point to.
• Give your visitors a choice between viewing an HTML or Flash version as soon as they enter the home page. Add a sample Flash movie with a short message:”Flash Player v.6 or higher is required to view this site. Download it from the Adobe website or skip this intro to view the HTML version of the site”.By adding a link to the HTML version you provide visitors who have no Flash player an alternative to leaving your site.
• Consider using SWFObject for programming. SWFObject is a flexible way to publish your Flash content, while also providing crawlable alternative HTML content. It detects whether or not a browser supports Flash and then serves either a Flash or HTML version of the website based on detection.
• Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that may not be installed on the user’s computer. In this case a technique like sIFR will help: it lets users without Flash player read a page, since the content / navigation is actually in HTML – it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object. By using it, you will make your site more visitor-friendly. Find more information about sIFR at http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines.We can see almost no move in the positions that the major search engines hold. Could it be the calm before the big Bing?

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

There is a notable difference between the shares of search engines for the given period. At the same time paid advertising has become much less popular than a year before.
Looks like hard times have forced the site owners to save money on paid advertising and shift their focus on organic traffic.

Experts say:

Savvy website owners should quit falling for the marketing hype that businesses and overly zealous web developers propagate… Search engines still are not that great with Flash-based content, in spite of all of the hype surrounding it. Flash-based content is typically not the best content.

Shari Turow,
SEO Expert