Ever wonder how to get those backlinks that are “in the content” on another site that has a high PR (page rank)?  Wish you had your competitor’s backlinks?  I’m going to [...]]]> Get Backlinks

OK, so I’m letting this one out of the bag.  I haven’t told anyone this to date… so consider yourself privileged =P

Ever wonder how to get those backlinks that are “in the content” on another site that has a high PR (page rank)?  Wish you had your competitor’s backlinks?  I’m going to show you how to get them and how to do it for FREE.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

First, you’re going to need a tool.  This one is fairly popular in the SEO community, but I am ever surprised at how many people don’t know about it.  Screaming Frog is a great way to see what’s going on with your competition’s websites.

Run your competition’s url through screaming frog and look for 404 pages… if they have upwards of 50 pages, there is a chance that they have some… especially if they are an older site.

Take the link for that 404 page and head over to http://www.backlinkwatch.com/.  Run the url of the 404 page through the backlink checker and with some luck you’ll turn up other websites that are linking to that 404 page.  Go to that site and email the admin stating that you noticed that they are linking to a broken page about “xyz” and that you just happen to have a page/post that covers the exact same thing (make sure that you’ve created some good content for them to link to) and give them the link.

A website admin will appreciate the value that you bring by pointing out the problem and also bringing the solution.  Bingo!  You’ve just picked up a great backlink.  Do this with all your competitions 404 pages and you’ll soon be on the road to higher PR.  The best of luck to you!

Well get ready to take some notes… because I’m about to explain everything about white hat SEO and how it differs from black hat SEO and how to create a great SEO strategy to get your Google Page Rank up.  White Hat vs. Black [...]]]> EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW SEO!

Well get ready to take some notes… because I’m about to explain everything about white hat SEO and how it differs from black hat SEO and how to create a great SEO strategy to get your Google Page Rank up.  White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO tactics are highly disputed and the following represents my personal opinions gleaned from webmaster tools provided by Google, Yahoo, and Bing as well as other SEO experts in the industry.

Be sure to get the download of my SEO checklist which I have included at the end of this article.

SEO Basics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around since the birth fo the first search engines back in the 90′s.  It is defined as the “process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results” (Wikipedia.org).  However, there are commonly approved methods of optimizing one’s website (i.e. white hat SEO) and there are methods that are looked down upon (i.e. black hat SEO).  SEO starts with a strong keyword targeting strategy… to be explained at length.

SEO is a very fluid industry… something that is “white hat” right now might become “black hat” in a year or two.  The reason is because Search Engines (SEs) are constantly refining their algorithms to weed out the pages that aren’t relevant or important to the person that is doing a search.  Therefore as an aspiring search engine optimizer, you need to stay up on the latest approved methods, and I’ll show you how to do that.

There are two important components to SEO:

• On Page SEO
• On page SEO deals with the structuring of your website pages to better display to Search Engines what content you cover.  It includes optimizing you “title”, “h1″, “h2″, “Meta tags”, “description”, “content”, and “alternate attributes” for keywords that you are targeting.
• Off Page SEO
• Off page SEO is the science of link building, plain and simple.  However, link building is a religion of its own — anchor text, surrounding text, inbound link quality, outbound link quality, reciprocal linking, # of links, etc.  It isn’t just about getting a 1000 links, because 1 high quality link from a high authority, relevant site will get you higher in the SERPs and more traffic than all those 1000 combined.

Now, without further adieu–

 Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is the process of combining on page and off page SEO in a way that the search engines do not generally approve of.  The benefits of black hat SEO are short term and it is questionable if they are really effective.  However, the penalty for employing black hat techniques could land your website on a ban list and being de-indexed by all the search engines.  That said, it is amazing how prevalent black hat techniques are in the SEO community.  To understand why site owners and even professional SEO agencies use black hat techniques, you have to understand the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) competitiveness.  But we’ll get into that further on down.  Right now, here are 10 popular black hat SEO tricks:

• Unrelated Keywords
• Adding copy full of keywords for extra views.
• Modern algorithms scan surrounding text and penalize this kind of behavior.
• Cloaking
• Presenting SEs with one set of content and visitors with another set of content, tricking viewers into viewing your site.
• SEs view this as lying and penalize your site by de-indexing your site and strongly related sites.
• Mirror Site or Duplicate Content
• Copy a significant amount of content from one site to  another in attempt to garner more views.
• Seen as spamming by the SEs, they penalize your site for this.
• Comment Spam
• Automatically post links in comments on blogs to increase the number of inbound links.
• Shows as un-natural link scheme in SEs database.  Plus can get you banned by other site owners.
• Link Farms
• Attempting to place high in SERPs by seeking links from sites with unrelated or low quality content.
• Google’s update “Panda” is pushing everyone to focus on quality and is punishing link farms.
• Hidden Links or Hidden Text
• Make text and links same color as background color so that it can be stuffed on the page.
• This is used in WordPress themes and counters a lot and will get the site penalized quickly.
• Link Wheel
• Use Web 2.0 sites like Hubpage, WordPress, Squidoo, Blogger, Weebly, etc to cross link yourself.
• Same “C” block (XXX.XXX.CCC.XXX) IP addresses is a tale-tale sign of a Link Wheel.  Easy to see, easy to penalize.
• Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages
• Stuffing page with keywords and then using it to redirect visitors to another page.
• Key Word Stuffing and Stacking
• Repeat keywords so much that it reads like gibberish.