A search engine has to try and answer these types of questions for you “Is this I am looking for?” “Does it provide me with enough relate information?” “Is this going to be useful in the future?” Well how does a search engine figure all that out. Well it uses a huge and fancy algorithm that is almost like magic which groups together web pages of a similar topic and then rates them in order of most relevant.

Getting into the category can be fairly simple. Make your site about a desired topic let the search engine find it and you are in. Getting to the top of that group is the hard part. Of course you have to offer good information that will be useful but even that won’t do it. Now back to the shoes. What if your friends told you those were a great pair of shoes, would that influence how you decided? What if it as a shoppers magazine? What about a Consumer’s Report? Each one of these adds a different type of value to the information you have and your overall decision. Then think about those recommendations you get from you don’t trust or is always selling junk. Would you trust those sources? Generally not.

Just like these recommendations for shoes that give you needed information and confidence a link does the same thing for a site. When other sites link to your site it says “I think this is important.” “I want to recommend it to others.” Getting one or two of these is a great start but what if all those in your category have 1,000 or even 10,000. Unless your link comes directly from Zeus that one recommendation doesn’t hold up against 1,000 recommendations very well. Also if the links you get are from spammy sources such as a site called diet-miracle-pill.com (not a real site) that just posts links on their pages to diet sites and that is all they do, not caring if the site is good or not, or true or not. ?Links like these are like recommendations that are from not as trusted sources. If the majority of your links are these kind of links it can really hurt your site.

So by getting more links (that are quality) you are basically getting more recommendations for your site. Get them to vary across different websites and you will be in business. Links are not everything but they do have a huge impact.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is part of a wider strategy to draw traffic from search engines called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Pay-Per-Click (PPC), commonly referred to as paid search advertising is generally the other piece of the SEM pie. But that’s a topic for another day.

SEO consists of four main parts:

1. Researching phrases that your potential clients are using to search for businesses like yours
2. Optimizing your web content to include those keyword phrases
3. Getting keyword-rich links to your site with those phrases
4. Tracking your results

SEO often requires an upfront investment of time and money before solid results appear, but this ongoing process can bring you highly targeted traffic over time. (For a more detailed overview of the SEO process see Search Engine Optimization Training)

How can SEO increase the Value my Press Releases?

When considering the SEO benefits your Press Release can have, there are two areas you must consider: The ranking potential of your website AND the ranking potential of press release itself.

A well structured press release can rank well in the news search engines, stays visible longer to those searching news engines and if it’s not time sensitive you can even rank in the normal search engine results with a little link building effort. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To optimize a press release here are some guidelines:

• Include keyword phrases in the title of the release. On many sites the press releases end up on, the title of the release becomes the title tag of the page, this is one of the most important factors in helping a page rank well.
• Include the keyword throughout the release, but especially in the first paragraph.
• If you include headings, naturally try include keywords there.

Helping a Press Release to reach a wider audience via SEO optimization is smart. However, with a little coordination with your search engine marketing company or team, every press release is also a chance to help your website rank better. Know the following items:

• Target keywords & keyword clusters
• Target pages (urls) on site
• Current search rankings for those keywords

Each release should include two to three keyword-rich links to different pages on your site. Each page on your site should be optimized to rank well for a handful of specific, related keyword phrases, a cluster. The keyword phrases you use to link to those pages should be the same keywords for which they are optimized. This combination of onsite optimization for specific phrases and related offsite links pointing to that page help it rank well for those phrases.

With these pieces of data in hand, you are armed with the information necessary to help your press release bring in traffic AND to contribute to your site’s overall search engine rankings.

What Online PR Tools Are Best?

Recently TopSEOs.com listed the top ten PR sites (Thanks @NewspaperGrl). A the top of their list was PRWeb.com, a site designed to help you specifically optimize your PR for SEO to get the largest reach possible. PRWeb & others have tools to help you know how many people saw your press release. In addition to this you should also be monitoring your own site’s stats to see how people are arriving on your site. You can tell this through your site’s referral statistics.

How Do I Assess the Effectiveness of My PR?

Every Press Release should have a call to action in it, an offer or a special discount. This doesn’t have to be the main focus of the release, but make sure to give the viewer something to act on. If this is in place, it’s one of the most important measures of effectiveness that you can monitor.

Other measures include views of the release, successful interviews from local or national news outlets as well as website traffic.

The Wrap-up: A Case for SEO in PR

As was stated at the outset of this article, a large majority of Press Releases go out every day and are NOT optimized for visibility on the web, let alone to help a company’s search engine rankings. With a little effort, you can drive targeted traffic to your website with the help of online Press Releases.

I hope these thoughts were helpful. If you have any questions, I’d love to write more on this topic, just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll get back with you with an answer. Call me too if you’d like us to come present to your company and share with you how we could help you increase traffic & sales. Follow me on Twitter @ioVspaceMonkee or get our latest blog posts and free workshop announcements @ioVentures

Contacting bloggers is a powerful tactic, it can be a win-win situation for both parties. Many bloggers are looking for new good and intriguing content.  A good strategy is to approach them with and ask if they would be willing to trade. You write some good content for them using the skills you know if they would let you post a link or two in that post. The blogger is getting new and good content and you are getting some high quality links.

There are definitely things you shouldn’t do when contacting bloggers and by studying those we can better learn what we are suppose to do.

Never Send a Mass Email:

Mass emailing may save you time in the initial work it takes to send out emails but your response rate will be so low it won’t be worth your time in the end. Remember bloggers are really people with time constraints, goals, dreams and are putting some hard work into their blog. They will be able to tell that you really haven’t spent much time on their blog and that your offer was sent to hundreds of people. They won’t feel a desire to respond.

A better way to contact a blogger is to spend some time on their site, read their posts, and get to know their style. Then tailor your message to them as an individual person. Acknowledge their work and what you liked about it; also refer to something specific that they have done on their blog.

Never Just ask for a Link:

Blogging is a business just like your ecommerce business or corner grocey store or the consulting company you own. You wouldn’t just let someone advertise on the side of your business, or in your newsletter, or on your employee’s shirts for free. A blogger isn’t going to include your link on their site just because you asked. They have to feel at least these 3 things first

1. There has to be obvious value for their readers
2. They have to feel that there is a personal benefit for them (whether that is a comission on sales, broadening their resources for their readers, or even an exchange of resources. For instance if you want a link on their site offer to put one on your site.)
3. They have to feel recognized. Bloggers work hard at what they do and they want to be appreciated for those efforts.

Never Start a Conversation with How Good your Company is:

Nobody likes to hear how good you are until they know you like what they do. If you start your letter out with statements all about you and how you are amazing a lot of people will just skip over the email and move on to something else. Acknowledge their strengths and what about their work attracted you to their blog. Then proceed to explain to them how a partnership would be beneficial.

How to Find Blogs in Your Industry:

Go to one of the following blog search engines and type in some industry specific phrases.  You should be able to find quite a few that write about your industry.  Don’t forget to search for blogs in related industries as well.

1. technorati.com
2. blogsearch.google.com

Wrapping Up:

Contacting bloggers takes a lot of one on one effort but it is worth your time because of the link value it will give you. Who knows, a blogger may even be willing to post about you, your business, or review a product you offer allowing you to be introduced to all of their readers.

Any questions?

Most directories on the internet are non paid and are free to use by anyone who has a website they want to list.  There are however, some paid directories that have a great impact on your SEO efforts and you will even get some traffic from them.  The first of these is the Yahoo Directory.

The Yahoo Directory is a paid directory hosted and maintained by Yahoo.  It costs $299/year to list your website.  Backlinks coming from the Yahoo Directory are high quality links because of the amount of page rank that this particular directory has.  You just need to decide whether or not you can afford $299 a year.  (In the beginning if the marketing budget is tight, I would spend that money elsewhere, but eventually it is worth paying for).

Another great paid directory is the Best of the Web Directory.  The links coming from this directory are not as powerful as the Yahoo Directory, but they are still high quality backlinks.  This site has two pricing options, first, you can pay one lump sum up front for $249.95, or second, you can pay annually for $99.95.  If you can muster up the $250, I would suggest that option.

Now, as I said a few paragraphs up, most of the directories on the internet are non paid.  All you have to do is go to the site and submit all the information they ask for.  Your site will then be reviewed and either accepted or rejected into their directory.  You will be notified by email when this happens.  I will go into detail on how to submit to these directories and get the most SEO value that you can.

How To Submit

1. You need to locate as many of these directories as you can and start submitting to each of them.  You can find a good list of the top 100 directory submission sites on the internet by clicking here.
2. Go to each site and start submitting.  You will want to look for a link that says "Add Link", "Add Site", "Submit Site", Suggest URL", etc.  Click there and you are on your way.
3. This is the most important thing to remember, or all of your effort and time will be wasted.  When it asks for the "Title of the Site" or "Link Name" or "Link Title" (I think you get the picture), you need to use your keywords, since they become the anchor text of the link pointing to your website.  You will also want to make sure that you have a nice variation of anchor text when submitting to directories.

Before I finish up, I should also talk about one other directory that is nigh impossible to get into, but if you do, it is one of the best links you can get in terms of SEO.  It is called DMOZ.org.  You need to know that you should only submit to DMOZ once.  If you keep submitting, your links will definitely be rejected.  If you do get rejected, you can submit again, but I would strongly suggest that you wait at least one year before re-submitting.  When submitting, you need to ignore my guidelines above.  Instead of adding your keywords as your site title, you need to use the name of your site.  If you use keywords, your site will be rejected. (DMOZ is the only exception to guideline #3 above!)

I hope this has been helpful, if I were in your postion, I would start by submitting to DMOZ and then move on to the others.  To see instructions on how to submit to DMOZ, click here.

Internal Linking Strategy #1: Content Linking

If you own a blog, inter-linking within your posts is an excellent idea. Every post you write watch for the keywords you are focusing on. If you use a keyword in your post link that word to the landing page URL you are trying to rank for that phrase. Blogging with your keywords in mind will increase the power and effectiveness of your blog and the generation of new relevant links will increase your power within your given niche.

Also outside of blogging it is beneficial to strive for that same form of linking with in the general content of your site.  Any article or content page that you create can link phrases within the text to other landing pages that are focused around ranking for those phrases.  These links help tie all your content together, allowing Google to understand better what your site or blog is all about and more specefically, what each page/URL is about.

Internal Linking Strategy #2: Navigation Bar Links

On the navigation bar of your site is a great place to add optimized links. For instance one of our clients operates an ecommerce site that sells tool parts. Their key phrases are phrases such as ‘DeWalt Parts‘, ‘Makita Parts‘ and ‘Bosch Parts‘ (I just used method 1 for external links to my clients site, but you get the idea). Orginally their navigation bar was a series of image links of the tool brand logos. Although this enhanced the look of their site to the user it decreased its effectiveness in Google. Image links are good for the use-ability of a site. Just make sure you include text links beneath the image so that Google can read what your links are about. And don’t forget to "nofollow" those image links.

Internal Linking Strategy #3: Footer Links

On every site you have the ability to add links to the bottom. These links will show up on every page in your site and are known as footer links.

When you have your clusters formed, choose the main phrase from all of your main category pages to include in your footer links. Here is a good example that we added for one of our clients:

http://www.cmoe.com/

Creating internal links within your blog and site will increase your site’s search engine exposure. Starting with these basic tactics is a great way to optimize your site. If you have any questions as to how or what internal linking is just add a comment below this post. Also if you have any other methods that have worked for you let us know, we would love to hear what has been successful for you.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is one of the biggest factors that influence what keywords you are raking for in the search engines.  Anchor text is the text that is found in the actual link pointing to your website.  At ioVentures we are trying to rank for many different keywords such as search engine optimization company.  Search engine optimization company is our anchor text that links to our landing page that talks about search engine optimization. You see, the search engines use links pointing to your website to help determine what your website is about and what your site should be ranking for.  Imagine if your site was about making brownies and you had a hundred links pointing to your site that say "click here" or "making chocolate chip cookies".  First of all, your site probably wouldn’t rank very well since the anchor text doesn’t have anything to do with your site.  Second, if you managed to get ranked for a keyword that isn’t related to your site, your conversion would be horrible.

One other thing that I should probably mention about anchor text, you need to vary the keywords you use when you get links.  Unfortunately, I learned this one the hard way.  When I first started out doing SEO, I used the exact same anchor text in each of my links.  I couldn’t climb the rankings for even the easy keywords.  Come to find out, the search engines analyze the number of links, your anchor text, and dozens of  other factors to determine if your linking patterns look natural.  If you were a search engine looking at all of my links that say the exact same thing, would that look natural to you?  Of course not!  This is referred to as Google Bombing.

So, what you need to do instead is come up with some variations of your keyword (at least 5) and use them as your anchor text.  (Read our post about grouping your keyword phrases into clusters).  For a website about making brownies you might want to use the following variations, making brownies, making gourmet brownies, instructions on making brownies… well, you get the picture.  This will make your linking profile look as natural as possible.  You might also want to throw some "click here" or "visit our website" in the mix as well.  Anything you can do to make your links look natural will boost your rankings greatly.

Related Content

Another huge factor that determines how good of a link you have pointing back at your website is the type of content on the page that links to your site.  If at all possible, you want to find links that are coming from pages that are very similar to yours.  You can tell if a page has related content by looking at the keywords in the title tag, header tags, and body of the text on that page. 

Basically if the site has something to do with your site, those links are the best to be on the hunt for.  The reason for this is because the search engines will not only see your anchor text that is specific to your website, but they will also see that another site in your industry is saying that your site is recommended by them.  These types of links with the proper anchor text are powerful links.

So remember, the more relevant the better.

Page Rank

Although not as important, page rank helps you rank higher in the search engines.  If you are a beginner, you are probably asking, what is page rank?  Page rank is a ranking that Google allocates to every web page on the internet.

Every link pointing to a web page passes along some page rank points.  The more links a web page acquires, the greater its page rank will be over time.  Generally speaking, the higher the page rank of a page, the higher the authority of that page meaning any links acquired from that page to yours is of higher value.

So, you will want to find links from sites that have high page rank.  Page rank goes from 0-10 with ten obviously being the highest.  The higher the page rank, the more that will be passed to your site.

Number of Links Going To Other Websites On The Page

The number of links on a webpage is a factor of quality.  The more links on one web page, the more diluted the power of each link becomes.  Less page rank is passed on through each outgoing link because it is distributed between more links. 

Link Positioning

To tell you the truth, sometimes you really can’t control this factor.  It has been proven that links within the content of a web page or blog post hold more value than those in a footer or nav bar.  These types of links also hold more power the closer they are to the top of the content or in other words, toward the beginning of the content.  The first link that the search engines see on a web page, the more authority they give that link.

I hope that this will help you in your link building efforts.  If done properly, your link building will really influence your website rankings.  Remember that you can’t control all of these factors in every situation but do the best that you can. 

The key to a successful link building campaign is to ALWAYS BE GETTING LINKS!  Be consistent and persistent your link building efforts and it will pay of with top rankings eventually. 

If you have any questions or comments about this topic, please feel free to make a comment below.

The purpose of an article is to spread general information about an industry or a concept. It can give an overview of the situation of the industry at present, or it can be an analysis of certain parts of that industry. It might be a relevant story about some happening within that sphere of business. Whatever the topic may be, these articles are extended to the readers for the purpose of keeping them informed on what is happening in the industry.

Why then does an article help your website to become the authority for your industry? Whenever you write an article online, you have a chance to make a name for yourself as an author. You will be able to write an author’s biography and describe what you do. In this biography you have the chance to reference your website and place links to landing pages on your site. When you make these links, be sure to use your keywords from your selected clusters as the anchor text. If you don’t, you aren’t building effective links.

These links help your site to rank in the search engines for your keyword phrases therefore establishing you as an authority in your industry because you will be on the top the the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

General Article Marketing Steps:

1. Write article
2. Write author bio
3. Submit article to each of the following directories

• EzineArticles
• Article Dashboard
• GoArticles
• Article City
• Buzzle
• SearchWarp
• ArticlesBase
• IdeaMarketers
• ArticleAlley
• Amazines

The Nitty-Gritty Details:

Writing Your Article

• Your article needs to be at least 400 words long.  Once you reach 400 words, finish the article as soon as possible.  You don’t necessarily get more benefit from your links if the article is longer so my opinion is not to waste your time going much past 400 words.
• Create a catchy title but be sure to include one or two keyword phrases that you will be using as links in the author bio.

Writing Your Author Bio

•  2-3 sentences that include 3 links with each link pointing to a different landing page on your site
• Use HTML coding to create these links.  An example of an author bio the way it needs to look when pasting it into the author bio form submission field is as follows:
• John Smith wants to help people learn about the different types of <a href="http://www.fezzari.com/categories/view/Road_Bikes">road bikes</a> and <a href="http://www.fezzari.com/categories/view/Mountain_Bikes">mountain bikes</a>.  Visit Fezzari today to learn more about or to purchase one of their <a href="http://www.fezzari.com">mountain bikes</a>.

Submitting to Article Directories

• Each article directory asks you to create an author account.  It is free to do so.
• Create a new email address that you will use just for these article accounts so as to avoid filling up your other emails with a lot of junk mail.
• Try to use the same username and password for all article directories so you don’t have to memorize more than one.
• Submit on a regular basis.  I recommend one article a week.  At the very least, one article a month.
• After you have some article links under your belt, start using an automated submission service.  The best one in the market by far is Unique Article Wizard.It costs $67 a month but it is worth it.

If you can take the time to continuously release articles on the web, you will soon find that you are building a strong ranking in the search engines and your traffic will increase. This tool is one of your keys to SEO success.

How can you get your story out there? The best way for you to do this is going to be a Press Release. A press release is a viable option where you will write a story on what is occurring in your company, or you can write a promotion for a new product you are distributing. Whatever your big news, you have the option of getting into the hands of the media so that they can grab it if they so choose.

Usually, you should not stress if your phone does not ring. There is link building power in the release itself.  Any media pick-up that might happen would be an added bonus. What then can you do to make your press release a strong link source for your site?   

You should choose a release package that fits your needs and budget. There are free press release sites, yet you should know that you get what you pay for. It will be worth your while to budget and get a quality press release done. Find the site that you wish to use. Two suggestions would be prweb.com and prleap.com.

Some of the things you will want to do as you write your press release would be the following:

1. Make sure to place links in the content of your press release. These links are the key purpose behind your release and they should not be excluded.
2. Be sure to use your keyword clusters as the anchor text for those links.
3. Be careful to only link once to each URL that you place in the press release.
4. Don’t use text with all caps.
5. Use a quote and some analytical information. This still ought to have meat to it so you can have the possibility of more media exposure.

If done correctly, a press release will be a great link building tool, and an opportunity for possible extra exposure. Be sure to track the effects of your press release and see the results of it. Watch your web traffic, analyze your amount of subscribers and return visitors to your site. All of these can be influenced by press releases. Do a good follow-up and analysis for yourself to see where you can change the way you use this tool.

In short, using press releases at times when you see fit will be a great way to build up your site, increase your traffic, and increase your site’s exposure.

Imagine a newspaper. When you are reading the newspaper, what do you do? You browse headlines to find the articles that interest you.  Once you find an article of interest, you might scan the article first looking at subheadlines to guide you.  We can all agree that the words in headlines and subheadlines are more important than the main body of the article.

In similar fashion, search engine bots read over the content of your web pages.  The bots tend to give more importance to phrases in headlines and subheadlines.  But what is considered a headline/subheadline to the search engine bots?  The answer is simple: Header Tags.  

Even though your page title might be big and bold and look like a headline to a human being, it is not seen as a headline to Google or other search engines unless it is turned into a header tag.  Those header tags are labeled in the code of your website, and the search engines look for those tags. Like the eyes that are looking for a relevant story, the search engines will place priority on H1 tags that cater to the desired search. 

You can make any text a header tag by simply adding a small snippet of html code around the text within the code of the website page.  Header tags range from h1 to h6 and the code looks like this:

<h1>Page Title Goes Here</h1> or

<h2>Subheadings Go Here</h2>

That’s it.  It’s not much code but adding them will help with your onsite optimization efforts.

How to put header tags into practice:

Put the main keyword phrase from that page’s cluster in the h1 tag for sure.  If you have any subheadings that are there for the user and they contain keyword phrases from that page’s cluster, then turn those into h2 tags.

Feel free to ask questions below. 

In my opinion, blogs serve three purposes.

1- To voice your opinions and ideas about the current industry that you are blogging about. In our case it is about SEO and internet marketing principles and strategies that we have developed, tested, and proven to work.

2- To increase the amount of traffic coming to your website. You see, the search engines love blogs! I would say probably even more so than normal HTML websites. Blogs, whether they are run by Word Press, Blogger, or any other blogging software make it easy for people like you and me to add new and fresh content to our sites without having to hard code anything. I’ll tell you what, Google loves websites or blogs that have new content and they come back to your site frequently to see what’s new. Because blogs are so easy to post to, you can save time and add new content all of the time.

As the search engines see new content and new internal links they will begin to rank your posts in their results. Blogs can generally get ranked pretty high with relatively little work in niche markets and with long tail keywords that you might not be focused on targeting at the moment. If you are using Word Press as your blogging software, you can use plug-ins like the Related Posts plug-in to supercharge your internal linking structure and get ranked even faster and get even more traffic.

3- For SEO value. It is no secret to anyone marketing on the internet that incoming links fuel search engine optimization and make or break your organic search rankings. It is vital that when adding new content, like blog posts, to link to other blog posts within your blog or related pages on your website. Yeah, it’s great to have a sweet internal linking structure down in your footer or side bar, but it has been proven that links within the body of your text have more value than those in other areas of your website.

Links are not the only reason why blogging helps your SEO efforts. It has also been proven that sites with over 100 pages do better in the search engines. It all goes back to the idea that you need to add new content to your website or blog regularly. The experts in the SEO industry suggest that you are adding content to your website every single day. This is why blogging is so great for your SEO efforts.

If you don’t have a company or site blog, you need to get one. Word Press blogging software is free and relatively easy to set up on your domain. If you don’t have the ability to set up a blog attached to your website, get a free blogger account. Anything is better than nothing! Take action today and work hard to add content every day! It will pay off.