Thursday, April 26, 2012

LinkedIn launched its long awaited iPad app and we can't help but squeal like a giddy school girl when envisioning how this is going to make business meetings and interviews so much more sexy now that you can hand over all of your goods to a potential employee or collaborator. Tune in tomorrow and we'll let you know our favorite features.
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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Link Building Techniques That Really Work

Link building is an important part of improving your SEO. Pages with a lot of high quality incoming links tend to rank well for their chosen keywords in search engines. Building links can be a time consuming process, but the following tips should help you to get the most out of your search engine optimization work. Below are my top 3 link building techniques:

Link Building Techniques | Focus on Quality

If you spend any time on webmaster forums, or sites such as Fiverr, you’ve probably seen advertisements offering thousands (or tens of thousands) of links for a small amount of money. Those links usually come from forum profile pages, blog comments, or poorly spun blog posts on automated blog networks. From a search engine optimisation point of view, those links are almost completely worthless.
Instead of spending time and money on such low quality links, you’d be much better off looking for a few links on high quality websites that are related to your niche.

Link Building Techniques | Finding Related Websites

Persuading people to link to you can be difficult. Even if you have a useful, well organized and visually appealing website, there’s no guarantee that another site owner will link to you just because you asked him to. You may reach out to several site owners and get just one or two responses.

This is where working with an SEO agency can be useful. A good SEO agency will have already built up a list of quality sites in various niches, and will already have a relationship with a lot of those webmasters. They’re more likely to get positive responses than an individual webmaster contacting people out of the blue.

There are some techniques that you can use to earn incoming links as an individual, however. Especially if your site includes a blog.

One popular method of building links is content syndication. If you allow people to syndicate your content on their sites, in return for a backlink, then you will grow your audience quite rapidly. If you’re worried about losing visitors to the syndicating site, put a reminder to subscribe to your RSS feed in your posts, to encourage people that like your content to come directly to the source in the future.

Another good way for bloggers to build backlinks is to take part in “blog memes” and “blog carnivals”. When you join one of these events, you agree to make a post about a specific topic on a specific day of the week, and link to the other blogs that are taking part in the event at the bottom of the post. In return, the other participants will link to you. This is a good way of increasing your audience, and getting to know other bloggers in your nice. In the long term, some of them may give you one-way links, which is where the real search engine optimisation benefit would come from.

Link Building Techniques | Earning Organic Links

In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to use an SEO agency to get incoming links, people would link to you freely and willingly without you or your SEO agency having to ask them.

Organic links are the best kind of links, because they have random anchor text, often link to deep pages (rather than your home page), and come from a wide range of sources. One way to get these is to offer user bars, badges, pre-defined link text (there are a lot of people that still don’t know HTML) and other tools for people that use your site. Post useful, high quality content, and let the links roll in.

Article written by Amy Fowler of SEO agency, Boom Online Marketing. For more from Amy, follow her on Twitter.

If you liked ‘Link Building Techniques That Really Work’, then you may also enjoy other articles about Search Engine Optimization available at http://ping.fm/BXRKv

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Investing in International Real Estate

There is nothing more exciting than investing in international real estate, though it is important that you know what you are doing and can spot a good opportunity from a dud. Nothing beats first-hand experience and by getting tips from the locals your foray into the international real estate market may become the new star of your investment portfolio. The following is a brief look at investing in international real estate.

Check It Out

Don’t even think about spending any money on anything until you’ve been there yourself and checked it out in person. Nothing compares to a first-hand look, and this will mean you avoid scams selling you property that doesn’t even exist.

Research the Law

Make sure that it is legal for you to own property in the country you have your eye on. Depending on the history of your and their country, you may or may not be welcomed as an investor. More often than not your money will get you what you want, but check out any limits on foreign ownership, as well as any regulations whatsoever to do with non-citizens owning anything. It would be a shame to pour a whole heap of money into a property investment for it to be declared illegal and confiscated.

Get Local Help

You just won’t be able to pull it off without some local help, even if you can speak the local language. Make use of any family, friends or acquaintances who might be willing to give you some advice. Get at least a few locals on your side by making it worth their while – having locals who are looking out for you will help you avoid becoming just another foreigner that doesn’t consider their needs.

Save On Your Holidays

One of the biggest bonuses of investing in property overseas is that you will never again have to pay exorbitant prices for accommodation on your holidays. Get your overseas property somewhere that you like going and all your future holidays will have the accommodation covered! Even once you have seen all that there is to see in the area, you can use your investment property as part of house swap to enable you to enjoy more free accommodation in other parts of the world. If you play your cards right, you may see your annual accommodation costs plummet once you have your overseas investment property.

Investing in international real estate provides not just an opportunity to get to know another part of the world, but also a fantastic opportunity to make a large amount of money. As the world financial markets have been thrown into disarray, physical investments have become the most sought-after.

Why restrict your investment possibilities to just one country, when there are opportunities all over the world? Your portfolio will never be the same once you’ve bought your first piece of international real estate.

Image: vichie81 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you liked ‘Investing in International Real Estate’, then you may also enjoy other articles about real estate investing available at http://ping.fm/oKWKJ

How to Optimize a Google Places Listing

With the increasing use of internet over the years, most of the business owners are turning to the search engine giant to attract people. Google Placesis a great way to get business found as it is used by millions of netizens everyday to drive traffic to their websites.
If you want to target customers in your local area, a free listing on Google places makes it very easy for customers to find you. People spending great deal of money on SEO and PPC’s can easily take advantage of this free

Google tool to drive traffic. To get started, you just need to submit the basic info like business name, website URL, telephone numbers, payment options, hours of operation, address and a photo and a video that highlights your business. One you submit all the relevant information,

Google send you a verification pin within 2-3 weeks which needs to be entered in the Google places listing to verify the same. Getting a Google places listing helps your business to get maximum local exposure. Google places listing are getting priority in local searches.

Tips on How to Optimize a Google Places Listing

Below mentioned are a few ways to optimize your Google Places listings:
• Content – Adding relevant content is the most important step. The more accurate and complete are your details, the easier it is for Google to decide your relevance to local searches. Use keywords where they are required to convert customers.
• Address – Specifying your location and physical address is of great importance to optimize your Google places listings.
• Images and Videos – placing images and videos prove to be very helpful.
• Customer’s Reviews – An important part of a local SEO strategy includes pushing as many customers as possible to write reviews. The more reviews you have, the more will be the possibility to claim one of the 7 place markers as Google places only lists 7 places per search.
• Placing Offers – You can place offers that relate to the keywords that are being targeted to increase your relevance in the searches.

Once your Google places page is verified, it becomes a bit easier for the potential customers to find you. You can use directories, review pages and local resources and event pages to build citations. Optimizing Goole places help increase traffic and reduce bounce rates.

Optimize a Google Places Listing | Benefits

Here are some of the benefits that that an optimized Google Places Page offers:
• It provides detailed information regarding product and services which helps prospects to find what they are searching for.
• Reviews and testimonials by the customers can help you stand out as well as make your business better.
• Posting videos and images give credibility to your business as many prospects prefer listing with images.
• You can also list cities, countries and region if you wish to open another establishment in the meantime.
• It can help you serve your customers better as you can mention your hours of operation or which day the store will be closed and likewise.

Understanding how to optimize a Google Places listing is benefitting a lot of businesses – don’t get left behind.

About the Guest Blogger: Abhishek Khandelwal is a SEO consultant. He is presently doing SEO for a number of physician recruiters and psychiatry recruitment firms.

If you liked ‘How to Optimize a Google Places Listing’, then you may also enjoy other articles about social media marketing and online local search directories available at http://ping.fm/CG1ZS

Monday, April 23, 2012

To Link or Not To Link; That Is the Question Post Panda 3.3

As we know, Google is constantly tweaking its rankings algorithm to improve the relevancy of its search listings. The first iteration of one of the most dramatic updates in some time, known as the “Panda” or “Farmer” update, rolled out in the spring of 2011. This update’s focus was to eliminate low quality content spam from its database. Since then, numerous tweaks to the Panda update have been implemented without major ramifications for most web masters.

That is until the most recent, Panda 3.3, which rolled almost exactly a year to the original Panda update. No less controversial, this one targets “over optimized” web sites; sites that use moderate to aggressive link building tactics, the utilization of blog networks and black hat tools to obtain links, the use of “un-natural” or over optimized anchor text and so on.

Since then, Google has sent out signals that indicate SEO is going to matter less in the future, and quality content is going to be paramount. According to Matt Cutts, new changes are going to “level the playing field”, making it easier for the folks who don’t focus on SEO to rank higher just by having a great, content rich site. This has left some webmasters wondering if this signals the “end of SEO.”

The short and quick answer is no, it doesn’t.

Why?

To answer that, we have to determine how any search engine determines relevancy, and assesses the quality of any of the sites in its database. There are three ways…

1. What you say about you: Essentially, this is the content of your web pages, and the various related HTML elements (Title and Meta tags, H1, H2 and H3 tags, etc.).

2. What others “say” about you: These are the in-pointing links from authority web sites, guest posts, blog comments links, bookmarking, directory sites, and so on.

3. What the social web says about you: These are the “Tweets”, “Likes” and “Google +1’s” that your site generates. Simply put, these are another form of links.

If we go back to the days before Google, when AltaVista, Fast, and Inktomi-powered engines ruled the ‘Net, ranking algorithms were determined largely by on page factors, or “what you say about you.” Since the vast majority of webmasters have a vested interest in presenting their web sites as the “best” regardless of whether they are or not, this didn’t always lead to the highest quality results. Plus, the results were pretty easy to game, by analyzing the densities of various on page factors, and altering your pages so they met them.

Then Google came along.

Google changed the rules of the game, because it figured “what others say about you” (in the form of in pointing links, which in essence act like “votes” for the quality of your content) would be a better metric to use in determining search relevancy than relying purely on on-page metrics.


And while there have been some glitches, this strategy has worked pretty well for Google. Despite the fact that Google’s results have been – up to this point at least – relatively easy to game using aggressive link building tactics, focusing on in-pointing links is still by far the best way to determine relevancy.

To suggest therefore, that SEO or link building is no longer applicable in 2012 is counter intuitive.

Think about what makes content great for a moment.

Is it fantastic prose? A conversational style? Citations or documentation to support statements? A certain number of words? Links to authoritative resources? A specific ratio of nouns to verbs?It could be any or all of these things. Or perhaps even none of them. The point is, what makes content “great” is entirely subjective. Determining great content from average content based entirely on on-page factors is, at the time of this writing at least, not something at which the search engines are particularly good.
It still makes the most sense to use off-page ranking factors – that means links from credible resources – to best determine this.

What about social signals?

These too are going to be important moving forward, but it’s unlikely that they can or will play a huge role in any ranking algorithm for the simple reason that most sites don’t get more than a handful of “Likes”, “Tweets”, and so on. You also need an established traffic base to generate social signals, so older sites would gain a huge and probably insurmountable edge over newer, or less popular sites, regardless of the quality of their content. That seems to go against what Cutts is saying.
So let’s go back to the “level the playing field” statement, and the assertion that Google is making it easier for sites that don’t focus on aggressive SEO to rank higher simply by having a great, content rich site. How does this play out for you?

Sidebar: Let us ignore the obvious incongruity; that engaging in smart SEO somehow precludes quality content. Investing in SEO has always been a smart business strategy and for many businesses; it generates a decent return on investment, which is exactly why it is done. If Google really is interested in delivering the best possible results to its audience, it can’t simply penalize sites that have used link building tactics in the past, if those sites really are the best possible option for their audience.
As anyone who has built a brand new site in the last year or two will tell you, expecting Google to drive traffic to it without engaging in some sort of link building is akin to waiting on the winning numbers in the lottery. It just does not happen.

What Mr Cutt’s is most likely saying therefore is this…

Sites that develop slow building, natural link profiles – with links that likely constitute genuine “votes” for the quality of your content, are going to do just as well or better as sites that obtain tons of links via aggressive link building for the sole purpose of manipulating search rankings.

Of course, it’s difficult for Google to assess what really constitutes a genuine link or not, and since the majority of small, content rich sites don’t receive many (or any) links from high quality authority sites, it simply can’t eliminate the value of all low quality links without compromising the integrity of its database. In many ways, low quality links are the most natural of links, and the sort of links most sites acquire (blog comment links, forum links and social bookmarking links are all prime examples).

So what’s the bottom line, moving forward?

Your link building has to appear as natural and “un-manipulated” as possible. Some ways to do this?…

1. Your anchor text needs to be varied and a percentage of it should be “un-optimized” (i.e., “click here”, “for more information”, etc.).

2. Links should point to internal pages of the site and not just the home page.

3. Links should come from a wide variety of link types (i.e., press releases, guest posts, blog comments, videos, social bookmarks, etc.).

4. A significant percentage (perhaps as much as a quarter) of your links should be “no follow.” Such links are part of a natural link profile.

5. The amount of links you obtain should be in direct proportion to your site’s traffic. A site that receives 10 visits a day, for instance, is not going to obtain 5,000 social bookmarks in a month.

6. Stay completely “white hat.” Forget tools that offer instant backlinks, traffic, etc. If Google doesn’t know about them now, it will soon, and will take the appropriate action. You will lose whatever ranking benefit you obtained, and may possibly incur a penalty.

It goes without saying that your content should be great. This is something Google has always claimed to hold paramount and should not come as a surprise. However, the biggest take home lesson from Panda 3.3 when it comes to building links is that if it “seems unreasonable”, then it probably is, and Google will act accordingly. Now more than ever, it seems, SEO is a race that goes to the tortoise, not the hare. Slow and steady should be your link building mantra, post Panda 3.3.

Mike Clarke is a blogger, author, webmaster, SEO consultant and occasional contributor to School Grants Blog.com.

Read more at http://ping.fm/CS551

Google Panda: A way to Build Delicate and Meaningful Links

Google Panda: A way to Build Delicate and Meaningful Links

Google took a step ahead in getting rid of duplicate content and low quality websites with its launch of a new algorithm last year, Google Panda. Over the months, Google has introduced improved versions of Google Panda, first targeting the spammy duplicate content sites, followed by a newer Google Panda update that aimed at getting rid of poor quality websites. Adding to this, Google also penalized some of the so-called ‘good sites’ for their poor linking practices.

Google’s continuous efforts towards eliminating all low quality websites and poor link building practices with improved Google Panda updates, clearly sends out a message to the link builders. It is time to bid farewell to low quality link building practices. Rather, concentrate on ‘white hat’ SEO techniques to build delicate and meaningful links for your website. That the competitors are doing it is no good excuse, and your website can be penalized and ‘thrown’ out of Google search engine for once and for all. It might be little difficult to digest, especially when you find your competitors ruling because of thousands and thousands of spam links. But then, Google is now more stringent than ever before, and you have to take your step towards building quality links, with Google Panda.

Determine Low Quality Links with Google Panda

The latest Google Panda update specifically mentions how you can determine whether the links to your website are valuable or not. As such, in the process of building quality and meaningful links for your website, it is important that you stay away from linking to websites that features the following characteristics:

Poor Quality Content – The websites featuring poor quality of content are deemed to be low quality sites by Google Panda. Poorly written content or spun articles get a thumbs-down from this giant search engine, and thus, stay away from linking to such sites
Lots of Ads – If your incoming or outgoing links feature lots of advertising chunks, Kontera text links, AdSense, etc., chances are high that Google Panda will fail to crawl your page

Low Traffic - If you thought that linking to a site that ranks 5th in Google search engine will get you good indexing from Panda, then it is important to know that if the website lacks in terms of social sharing or traffic generation, then it might be devalued in future. A well optimized site may not always be able to attract traffic, going into the ‘bad books’ of Google Panda. So, stop spamming your comments to such blog or linking to them

Lots of Links – If you find a blog or content with lots of links to it, chances are high that these are spam, and obviously you would not love to run behind it
Thus, the core strategy towards building delicate and meaningful links is to walk in hands with Google Panda. Concentrate on developing quality content and link building that is less in numbers but high in quality. With its strict page indexing norms, Google Panda paves the way for link builders in developing quality and relevant links for their websites or blogs.

About the Author: James miller is a social media marketing expert who contributes his Online marketing experiences on behalf of Social media marketing London.
If you liked ‘Google Panda: A way to Build Delicate and Meaningful Links’, then you may also enjoy other articles about search engine optimization available at http://ping.fm/HgyXl