Backlinks To The Future!

We are now on Day 29 of the Thirty Day Challenge and it's all about backlinks. If you hadn't gotten it from previous posts then here's the scoop. Backlinks are one of the most important aspects to having a good page ranking in Google. Using Ed Dale's earlier analogy that Google is the bouncer and your niche is the niteclub, well backlinks (from reputable sources) are link having someone well known to the club/bouncer put in a good word for your ugly self. If I manage to get a backlink on a site that Google regards as an authority in my niche, it's like someone cool walking me up to the door of the club and saying "this guy is okay, treat him well". Obviously, the more of these cool people you have coming to the door with you, the more likely you are not only going to get in, but also you're going to get a good table near the front of the stage (equals high page ranking).

Now some people think that the more backlinks you have the better off you are, but that's not necessarily so. Quality always wins out over quantity. The best backlinks to have come from authority sites in your niche. If you're selling sausage making tips then you want to get backlinks from sites that at the very least revolve around the processing of meat. Having a backlink to your sausage making tips come from a computer game website is probably not going to do much for you in terms of gaining Google's trust and confidence. If you walk up to the door of the sausage making niteclub with a guy who knows about sausage making and says you're okay - huge plus. If you walk up to the door of the sausage making niteclub with a guy who knows everything there is to know about car parts, Google is not going to care so much. Don't get me wrong, almost any backlink is a help - but if you're going to take the time to submit your site for backlinks then you might as well go to relevant niche sites to do it. To see how to go about doing that you can read my previous blog post.

Now, once you've done the hard yards with authority sites in your niche you can try hitting directories for a bit more of a boost in the rankings. Directories are basically sites that will list your site in a particular category relevant to your niche. Google will take notice of these places, but only in a cursory way. Directory submission is something you should not bother doing manually, as the time it takes will not be rewarding enough. Thankfully, there is directory submission software out there that takes away alot of the time-consuming aspect. One such tool can be found at imwishlist.com - where you can also download an article submitter to place your content on other platforms such as Ezinearticles. I'm a bit skeptical about article submitters because of the duplicate content rule on Google. Basically, Google will penalize anything it sees as duplicate content, and relegate it to the "sandbox" - also known as the Supplemental Index. Basically, lost in the ether.

A great place to go to find directories to submit your sites to is addurl.nu. It has a list of over 800 directories that you can submit to, along with their page ranking (the higher the PR the more "authority"), so you can just focus on the directories that are going to mean more to Google.

One of the good and bad things about directory submissions is that they usually take quite a while to show up. Usually around 3 to 6 months for a free submission, but some work a little quicker. I say this is good because what it means is that you can submit to multiple directories at once without fear of Google thinking you are spam and sandboxing you. If you were to do the same thing with social bookmarking sites then Google would consider you a spammer and drop you like a hot potato.

If all this time and trouble and waiting is too much for you then you can also pay to have your site listed on various directories. This will generally guarantee you a quick listing. If you have plenty of money then you might as well hit the big wig directories - Yahoo and DMOZ. Yahoo submission run at around $300 a year. I'm not sure the price of DMOZ but it's not that much. Of course, in keeping with the principles of the thirty day challenge we do not want to spend any money just yet, so I'll pass on the paid submissions and stick to the free ones.

Another place to acquire backlinks for free is by answering questions relevant to your niche in Yahoo Answers. What is Yahoo Answers? Well, it quite simply a place where people post questions and other people answer them. The asker then picks the answer that suits them as the best. You can build up points for having your answer picked as the best.

When you first go to Yahoo Answers you should click on the 'Advanced' link and make sure the "open questions" is checked. This will then give you the questions that you can still post answers to (once a best answer is picked the question becomes closed for anymore answers). You then do a search for your keyword phrase and see what comes up. If you find something you can answer try and put your keyword in the answer somewhere (but not in a spammy, sales way). You are given a 'source' box that you can then enter the address of your site. If you can be bothered you can also search through the 'resolved questions' and add comments instead of answers. The advantage of Yahoo answers is that it is niche specific, which Google likes. It's worthwhile spending an hour or so every few days going through trying to answer questions and add your backlink. The most important thing here, though, is to make sure your answers are contributive. Don't just post some crap, through your URL in and expect it to be okay. Yahoo Answers is moderated and if you spam you're likely to have your answer deleted and your account suspended.

Ed's Podcast for Day 29 of the challenge talked about the various niches that he's had a look at from other thirty day challengers, and the mistakes some of them had made when trying to get ranked. I really wish I could have gotten my site looked at - but hopefully I'll network someone who knows enough of their stuff to be able to tell me if I'm doing something wrong with my site. For some reason I just can't get it off Page 4 of search results, no matter how many relevant backlinks I work up. My Squidoo lens is holding up okay, but with my next niche I'll definitely be trying a new platform other than Blogger. I thought it would be favored by Google seeing as Google own it, but maybe because it's so big Google don't consider it such a knowledge base after all.

Ed's advice when starting to add content to your platform is making sure you put your keywords in the heading of your blog, to write a decent description in the heading of your blog for Google to pick up. Don't throw too many articles up at once at the beginning. Just make one post and wait for Google to index it before you make any more. Do a little social bookmarking on that one post, but not on the first day and no more than 5 sites every other day. Make sure that whatever platform you use there isn't already a bunch of people trying the same niche on that platform. If so, use another platform. There are hundreds of viable platforms to choose from, so go out there and knock 'em dead.

There is only one more day of the Thirty Day Challenge left for me to blog about - I'll then be carrying on with my new niche idea and documenting my attempts at getting better results with that then I've had with my current two niches.

Link Analysis & Blogs/Forums

I got a bit ahead of myself with the Day 27 lesson. I shouldn't have actually gone into checking out the competitors backlinks through Yahoo.com. That was actually part of today's lesson, so here we go.

Link Analysis

The first part of the lesson for today is Link Analysis. This is where you use search engines to reveal the link network of your competitors. You start by doing a search for your keyword phrase in Google, making sure you have the Firefox SEO tool activated. This will show a number of things, but the one we're interested in today is the Yahoo page links. This result can be accessed by clicking on the '?' next to the 'Y! Links' link - it can also be automatically turned on for each search by clicking on 'Tools' at the top of your browser, then going to 'SEO For Firefox', then 'Options'. You can then select which results you want to see automatically, and which you want to see On-Demand. By default, all results are set to 'On-Demand'. If you're using Microsoft's Internet Explorer then you should stop using it right now and switch to Firefox. IE is dead, Firefox is the future - of that you can be certain.

The Yahoo links number is the number of links that Yahoo can find that link to the page in question. Obviously we don't know how many of these links are relevant at this stage. The manual way of looking at these links is to go to Yahoo.com. Type in "link:[URL of #1 ranking competitor]", and Yahoo will return all known sites that link to that page. You can do the same with Google but they generally return much fewer results for some reason. Once you have your list you check them out to find which are relevant. Most of the time you can tell just from the blurb that goes with the URL, but sometimes you will have to check out the site as well. There are software tools that allow you to check for relevant sites for more quickly, but as these cost money they are outside the scope of the thirty day challenge. Unfortunately, Rob didn't even name them so I couldn't go to my P2P network to see if I could find them there and give them a try.

Once you find a site that seems relevant the next thing to do is check whether they have 'no-follow' links on their site. When it comes to backlinks, Google will go to your site and be able to find all the pages that link to it from other sources. However, if a link is No-Follow, Google will not record that as a backlink to your site. Some sites put No-Follow in place to dissuade spammers from spamming their sites. By default, if the Firefox SEO tool is active, then No-Follow links should appear in a red box. Some search engines, such as Yahoo, will still credit you with a backlink if you post on a No-Follow link site, but Google will not. Other things to look out for are sites where links have been removed by moderators, or sites, such as forums, where links are not allowed in signatures (or signatures have been turned off completely).

Blogs and Forums

You can also find other niche relevant content sites for creating backlinks by going to Technorati or Google Blog Search. These sites provide the ability to search for blogs in your niche. You can simply visit them, type in your keyword phrase, and see what turns up. In a lot of cases, you will be able to visit the blogs that appear in the results and post a comment which includes a link back to your site. Try using a unique name when posting in blogs and forums, so you can then set up your Google Alerts for that name to make sure the posts appeared, and to add to your comments if necessary. When commenting on a blog or forum always make sure that your comment is relevant to the blog post, so that it adds to it or it is a well thought out opinion. Simply throwing up a link to your site with a "nice post" comment will generally get your comment removed.

For forums, you can search for your niche in Google simply by typing "[your niche] forum". This will generally give you a list of sites that are relevant to your niche but that also contain forums. You can then visit these forums, make sure they allow signatures to be posted, and then sign up and start making your contributory comments. Who knows, you may even find yourself part of the community after a while. In the case of forums it is much better to simply post comments relating to the topic at hand, rather than trying to turn each of your posts into a "look at my site" post. Include a link to your site in your signature, and if your forum posts are compelling enough people will click through to your site anyway. Plus, a link in a signature is a common thing in forums, so moderators will be less likely to consider it spam. In fact, if you've followed along with the thirty day challenge properly, and written your great content, it won't be spam at all.

Other sites to check out and possibly post comments on are Squidoo and Hubpages. To find your niche on these sites you can type in the following 'site:squidoo.com "sign my guestbook" "[your niche]"', and this should produce a list of lenses in your niche that allow guestbook comments.

Link This!

After a weekend we are on to Day 27 of the challenge and the podcast for today had Ed getting a little hot under the collar about spammers and critics. Spammers, who have been using the 30DC techniques for their own spammy needs, thereby undermining the process for the rest of us. It breaks down like this: If a bunch of spammy spammers use these techniques as Ed has detailed them, then those places that Ed has suggested we put our content (ala Tumblr) will see that as a representation of all the 30DCers...because as we know, people see the bad things first and judge all else by that first impression. Of course Tumblr didn't want to be known as a spammers paradise, so they did the only thing they could do, shut everyone down. Why should they go through each individual page to see if the content has merit?

Ed then went on to have a go at the critics out there, who say the 30DC is just a bunch of hot air. These people are generally made up of those who either haven't even taken the challenge, or took it and failed because of their own choices for niches.

Anyway, Ed announced that all the forums and training for the 30DC would continue to be kept up on the site so that anyone can take the challenge again and again, as often as they like, whenever they like. He also mentioned that there would be sporadic future lessons that would deal with product development, amongst other things. He talked about the ease of creating audio and video products as long as you were comfortable with talking/creating videos.

He also asked us to have a look at Michelle MacPhearson's blog for some good information, including the 2nd edition of Luke Parker's Free Online Advertising Encyclopedia. A must-grab. You can download a copy here.

The it was over to Rob Somerville to talk about Link Building. Link building is when you create backlinks to your blog or site. What link building does, is tell Google that, because all these other sites have links to your site - and because these other sites know what they're talking about - Google should put you higher in the ranking for your keyword phrase. It's sort of like being vouched for, except you're vouching for yourself really. Over time, with decent content, you'd be able to build links naturally, as sites that have something in common with yours and like your stuff will link to your site anyway. However, that can take a long time and with so much competition out there it may never happen, so we need to help things along a little. The important factors to look for when trying to place your link on another site is: age of the site you're putting your links on and content relevance of the site you're putting your links on. If you're putting links on a new site that Google doesn't even recognise anyway, then it's a waste of time. To put your links on a site that has nothing to do with your niche is also a waste. Link quality is far more important than link quantity, but a combination of both built up over time is the best of all. You should always try to include your keyword phrase in the anchor text of your link. I generally just put the URL in most cases anyway, as it includes the keywords from my blog. Links from .edu and .gov are better still to have, although obviously harder to secure.

You can use yahoo to identify the backlinks of your competitors, and then go after those as well. Using the SEO tool in Firefox, you can see how many Yahoo banklinks a competitor has. Then by clicking on the Yahoo links link, it will take you to a page that lists all the backlinks to that page. So then you can review the backlinked sites, and determine which ones are best for going after.

Another way to find sites of relevance, is to create a Google Alerts account. This you can set up through your GMail account if you have one, and you can get Google to email you everytime they find a site that has your keyword phrase in it - you can then go to that site and see if it's possible to create a backlink to your content on that site.

Ultimately, though, the best link building strategy is to create great content that other people in your niche area will want to link to. Remember, not everyone is out to make money online - some are just there to pass on knowledge and information, and if yours is up to snuff then others will link to it and share it around (and hopefully give you the credit you deserve).

You can basically create backlinks yourself by commenting on blogs and in forums, making sure that you can include a link back to your site. Don't be spammy, though, always write something that adds to or contributes in someway to the rest of the content on the site. If it's a blog, make a comment about the content and try to steer that to your blog. If it's a forum, make posts that contribute to the thread you're posting in, otherwise in most cases your post will just be removed by the moderators. If you contribute then you're more likely to be left alone. The best way to post in forums without seeming spammy, is simply to include your blog address in your signature, so that every time you post a backlink is created and it's not about tricking people or spamming them into visiting your blog.

You can also try reciprocal linking, where you arrange with someone who has a site in your niche, that you will create a link to their site if they create one to yours. In this case always make sure you specify what the link text should say.

You can also submit your site to various directories, such as Yahoo and DMOZ (the big two) but this is usually expensive (Yahoo is US$300 a year).

I set up a Google Alerts account and within a couple of days I got an email that led me to a site that had ripped off my blog content and put it up on their own platform. At first I was pretty angry, because I was sure that Google would penalise me for having duplicate content, but after posting on the 30DC forum about it and reading the replies, I realised that the other guy was most likely to be penalised. I posted comments on all his blog posts, directing people back to the "original source" of the content, my blog - thereby creating a backlink for myself. Within a couple of days his site had vanished.

Things to avoid when trying backlinks: Link farms, irrelevant sites, low-authority sites, porn or gambling sites, duplicate content and links from deep within a site's structure.