How to figure out the value of a back link?

Before you decide to get a link from a site, evaluate the value of the linking page and the linking site. I have found 10 factors which can help. If you know of any other factors, then please share it in the comment section below. Here are my 10 factors:

1. Page Rank of the potential linking page and the linking site.

   Although Page Rank is not the most important factor to consider, i started with PR because it tells a lot about a page. If PR is grayed, then may be the linking page is not in the Google Index, may be it has got some penalty, it may be a brand new page, may be it is not getting any link juice because of some crawling issues or it may be blocked from search engines via robots.txt or meta noindex tag. In either case, it make sense to digg out why the PR is grayed. If it is grayed because of any of the aforesaid -ve SEO issues, then the page is not worth targeting for a back link.

2. Cache Date of the potential linking page

   Through Cache date of the linking page you can find out, how frequently the linking page is crawled and indexed. If cache date is more than 3 months old, then the page is not worth targeting as bots may have stopped crawling the web page.

3. Index Status of the potential linking page

   Use site: command on Google to find out whether the page is in the Google Index or not. If site: command doesn’t return any results, then simply copy and paste the contents of the page in Google search bar. If the page doesn’t come up on SERP for its own contents then it is not in the Google Index and hence not worth targeting.

4. NoIndex, NoFollow Status

   Make sure that the liking page doesn’t contain nofollow and noindex meta robots tag. Also check the robots.txt for any possible blocking of the page from the search engines.

5. Outgoing Links

   Ideally the number of outgoing links (both internal and external) on a webpage should not be more than 30. More the number of outgoing links on a web page, lesser is the value of a link from that page. So if a potential linking page has more than 100 outgoing links, then it is not worth targeting.

6. Back link Analysis

   The links on the potential linking page should be direct and do-follow links. They should not be redirected, JavaScript, short url or no-follow links. Often link builders take only no-follow links into account. JavaScript, short URLs and redirected links are almost as bad as no-follow links in terms of passing link metrix. I used the word ‘almost’ because they do pass some link metrix. But how much they pass which can be considered optimum for improving rankings is still in question. Therefore for the best practice, stick to direct do-follow links.

7. Anchor Text

   Make sure that the anchor text of your back link contain your targeted keywords. Some webmasters won’t let you use your desired anchor text as it reduces the readability of their site and give a bad user experience. Like you submit an article on ‘selecting car insurance companies’ on the linking site and then sign it as ‘Car insurance India’ with a link back to your site. But ‘car insurance india doesn’t make any sense as a stand-alone text (even if you used it between text). So it makes sense to contribute something which can justify the use of your anchor text or use anchor text in an intelligent way like: ‘Zeyx Car Insurance Company of India’.

8. Topical Relevance

   The linking page and the linking site should be on the same/similar topic as the linked to page. If it is not, then the potential linking page won’t pass any topical relevance to your website. It means if your website is on ‘Dogs food’ and you get a link from a ‘cats food’ website, then that link won’t make your website any more relevant for the keyword ‘Dogs food’.

9. Geo-Relevance

   The linking page and the linking site should be relevant to the geo-location your site is targeting. If it is not, then the potential linking page won’t pass any geo-relevance to your website. It means, if your website is targeting ‘new york’ and you get a link from the site which is relevant for ‘los angeles’, then such link won’t make your site any more relevant for the ‘new york’ area.

10. Trust and Authority

    Last but not the least, you need to determine the trust and authority of the linking page and the linking site. You can use ‘open site explorer‘ for this. Through page authority and domain authority you can determine the ranking potential of the linking page and the linking site.
    Source: SEOTakeAways.com

What is SEO and how it can define or rank for 2012

What is SEO? The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization. But the definition of SEO is a more difficult question.

It’s not what it once was, that’s for sure. The problem is, I see references to outdated definitions of SEO on a fairly regular basis.

If you have arrived here thinking SEO is a sham, snake oil and/or dead then a) you are grossly mistaken and b) let me disabuse you of that notion.

SEO Definition

Here’s my definition of SEO in 2012.

Search Engine Optimization is a multidisciplinary activity that seeks to generateproductive organic traffic from search engines via technically soundand connected sites by matching query intent with relevance and value.

It’s a bit of a mouthful, I know. I’ve emphasized the areas that I feel are particularly important and deserve a more in-depth explanation.

Productive Traffic

The goal of SEO is not to increase traffic willy-nilly. You increase traffic by 30% but it makes no difference to the bottom line. Who cares!

Productive can mean different things to different companies. Productive may mean leads or subscribers or revenue or page views. Whatever it is, it’s important to define and track productive traffic rather than simply focusing on increasing traffic overall.

I might be able to generate more traffic by adding ‘Nude’ and ‘Free’ as keyword modifiers but is that really going to bring productive traffic to a site?

This goes (way) beyond brand versus non-brand traffic, which I find to be the most rudimentary of divisions. This is having a fundamental understanding of the traffic that makes a difference to that business.

That may mean moving away from high volume terms and generating less traffic overall. Don’t get saucer eyes when it comes to keyword volume. It’s about the right keywords, not the biggest keywords. (That’s what she said!)

Yet, even if you’re driving the right traffic there are other factors that contribute to a productive visit. If the focus is leads, you might realize that the call-to-action is weak, doesn’t match the query intent or competes with other elements on the page. Perhaps the lead form itself isn’t very good either.

If the goal is page views, you may realize that the design is confusing, the text hard to read and the content without a structure that allows for easy navigation.

Because productive traffic is the goal an SEO needs to understand design, user experience, information architecture and conversion rate optimization. Otherwise it’s like a chef who creates a menu but then has no input on how the food is cooked, the quality of ingredients, decor of the establishment or the presentation of the meal.

It’s okay if you’re in the business of driving any old traffic at a website and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn’t really do anything for the business. But that’s not SEO. You’re just a burger flipper at some fast food joint.

Technically Sound

As an SEO you need to have very strong technical skills. What does this really mean though? At a minimum, it means you need to know how the Internet works and how search engines crawl and index the web.

You should also be comfortable analyzing HTTP headers and know your status codes cold. Get good using Firebug or Chrome’s Developer Tools. Mine those weblogs, because there’s gold in them there data. (Sorry, I just watched True Grit.) Bonus points if you can code something up yourself to extract it.

Understanding how to diagnose and solve accessibility and crawl efficiency problems is critical.

SEO is about knowing enough about … everything. HTML, CSS, JQuery, AJAX, Flash, JavaScript, XML, JSON, RSS, PHP, SQL. Experiment with and understand these technologies.

But you’re not done yet because you still have to understand the technical side of specific search engine directives including (but certainly not limited to) noindex, nofollow, rel=canonical, rel=author, rel=publisher, rel=standout, hreflang and various competing schemas of microdata.

SEO is about knowing all of this to ensure technical issues aren’t obstacles and to create positive relationships with engineers. You must speak their language. You don’t have to understand everything and you should never bluff, but you damn well better be able to carry on a coherent conversation.

You should know the difference between a GET and a POST; between server side and client side scripts. An SEO should be able to convey when and why to use a cookieless domain. You shouldn’t get a deer-in-the-headlights look when engineers talk about CDNs or minifying code.

I haven’t even touched on diving into the details of information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning and other methods that inform modern search engine algorithms.

The more technical you are the more effective you become. And there’s always something more to learn.

Connected

What do I mean by connected? Today it means links to and from other sites and connecting with and through others on social platforms. In plain language it’s about links and social.

I’m not a huge fan of link building and prefer a link gardening approach. Mind you, I understand the value of links but too often link building is done for the wrong reasons and weighted far to0 heavily in the scheme of things.

It works a fair amount of the time. I can’t deny that. But I’m never sure at what expense. Too often I see those companies on a treadmill of link building efforts. Frankly, you should reach a point where link building isn’t something you’re workingat.

Oddly, linking out is an overlooked and underrated tactic. Tadeusz Szewczyk was an early and strong proponent of this practice. Linking out is a form of built-in reciprocity. You wind up getting back links from those to whom you link out. It’s a way of connecting to and engaging with people in your niche.

That sounds a lot like social doesn’t it? Social takes on a number of dimensions. First is producing content that is worthy of sharing and then doing everything you can to make it portable. That includes an interaction design that promotes sharing andensuring that the shared content is optimized.

Of course there’s also really being social and getting out on these platforms and connecting with your users and customers. I don’t mean public, glorified customer service but actually socializing with some of your users and customers. This is both extremely tough to do at scale but also valuable for a variety of reasons.

Today it also means understanding how social is being integrated into search (it’s not the other way around) and learning Facebook SEO and Google+ SEO.

Intent

Now we finally get to the real heart of SEO and the initial reason I started this blog post. Query intent is perhaps the most critical part of SEO.

You should understand the syntax of your user and the motivations behind their search and queries. At the bare minimum you should understand differences between navigational, informational and transactional queries.

No, this is not about personas. All too often time and money are spent creating personas that create artificial divisions in the long-term, a type of stereotype that others glom onto to as a way to promote their own views. “Remember, that’s not what Sally Searcher is about.” (Ugh, kill me now.)

Instead this is about doing the hard work of understanding how and why people are searching for your content and products. It’s about syntax, psychology and consumer behavior among other things.

Intent is also informed by context. Geography, time of year and platform (i.e. – mobile) can all play an important part of understanding intent. It’s never something you can just copy and paste from one site to another.

For instance, here’s a real search that wound up coming to this blog.

how to change the blue link title of your website

I find these types of queries fascinating. It forces me to think different. SEO is about knowing how people are thinking and searching, not how that business thinks their users should be searching. SEO is an advocate for the user.

Relevance

Not too long ago SEO was about matching keywords with relevant content. This is why content farms became so popular and profitable. All you needed to do was take a long-tail keyword and match it with relevant content. It also meant you could shard a keyword concept into a large number of pages.

So you might find a different page for ‘how to squeeze orange juice’ and ‘how to squeeze fresh orange juice’.

Was the content relevant on these pages? For the most part, yes. But it was the content equivalent to empty calories.

That doesn’t mean that relevance isn’t important. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It’s still incredibly important. A fair amount of on-page SEO is about making relevance obvious. Because it doesn’t just need to be relevant, it has to be perceivedas relevant at a glance.

Relevance must be seen through the lens of intent instead of a simple keyword match. Relevance is the beginning, not the end of SEO.

Value

Relevance is always coupled with value. Is value subjective? Sure. But it gets easier when you trace it back to intent. Does that page truly satisfy the query intent? Notthat it’s relevant. Not that it matches the keyword. Did the page provide enoughvalue to satisfy intent.

You’ll notice that I’ve used satisfy twice and that’s not by accident. Search engines (and SEOs) are increasingly concerned with user satisfaction. An SEO might not talk about ‘delighting the user’ (eye roll) but we’re measuring satisfaction through both qualitative and quantitative measures.

Is it readable? Was the user experience positive? Were they able to find the information? Did it lead them to other related content? Was it easy for them to subscribe or buy? Were they able to print or share the page? How many pages did they view? Did they convert? What is the bounce rate?

We’re also there to call your baby ugly and identify gaps in a site’s content. That might mean the content produced isn’t valuable enough or that there is unsatisfied query intent (i.e – you don’t have the right content).

SEO is about producing positive and satisfying interactions that support the brand and flow into other marketing channels.

What About Rank?

You’ll note that I didn’t talk at all about rank. Rank can be important but only in the context of driving productive traffic. In many ways rank should take care of itself if you’re doing everything else right.

In addition, rank becomes less important when you’re working on large sites with more than, say, 100,000 pages. There are ways to measure rank in these situations but I don’t often find that of great value except in communicating with clients obsessed with rank.

Rank is also losing it’s fidelity with the continuing personalization of search results. If Search+ is here to stay then rank will become increasingly fractured.

SEO vs Inbound Marketing

There are many who probably look at my definition and explanation and believe it better matches ‘inbound marketing’. This new umbrella term created by Hubspot works for a lot of people. They find it easier to describe and convey to clients. It’s more palatable and allows them to distance themselves from the poor reputation SEO has acquired. I get it. But I don’t like it.

I’m an SEO and I’m proud of it.

I use SEO as a client filter. I can skip those who think it’s snake oil, find the ones who ‘get it’ and help educate those who might be on the fence. In many ways these are the clients who are most thoughtful and can contribute and collaborate on SEO efforts. Those are my kind of clients.

If I were trying to sell into the Fortune 100 or have thousands of clients under contract at a time I might decide inbound marketing was a better term. I wouldn’t have the time to explain and educate.

That’s not Blind Five Year Old. While the company is expanding, I still have the ability to create personal relationships with clients.

In the end, I’m not sure I want to work with a client who would accept my help under the guise of inbound marketing but not as an SEO. Perhaps that’s my own type of elitism.

SEO 2012 Example

So lets take my SEO definition and apply it to an example. Suppose you have the query ‘eureka lightforce 300 manual’. What do you suppose the intent is behind that query?

Are they really looking for that vacuum’s manual? Or are they instead having a problem with their vacuum? If you were able to look at query reformulations you’d see users cycle through modifiers like troubleshooting, repair, problems, information, solutions, manual and parts. In fact, you can use Google’s related queries to see how these are linked.

Two years ago you might have been able to get away with creating a page with a highly optimized Title, dynamic boilerplate text, a generic product description and a link to a PDF download of that manual. It would have been relevant but you wouldn’t have truly satisfied intent or delivered real value. More to the point, the value that you delivered was a commodity.

What would a SEO page for this term look like?

You’d still have a solid Title, product description (and specs), and a link to the manual. But you’d add a list of common problems with that vacuum along with potential solutions. These might include step-by-step DIY repair guides.

You’d provide links for replacement parts. You might dynamically serve them local vacuum repair shops. You may even have a section dedicated to buying a new vacuum. Maybe you even have a calculator that tells you whether it’s worth fixing the old vacuum or buying a new one. Heck you could even provide links to house cleaning services.

A well designed page with these elements would provide relevance and value, thereby satisfying query intent.

TL;DR

SEO is about generating productive organic search traffic by matching query intent with relevance and value. The implication of this definition is that SEO must draw upon an increasing number of disciplines including design, user experience, information architecture and conversation rate optimization.
Source : http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/what-is-seo

8 SEO buzz tips that boost your Business Website

SEO is the term search engine optimization, which helps to build your website according to search engine algorithm that works easy to promote your business website and providing better searching index. There are eight points written below which you can take knowledge what tips or suggestions we should take in our site to promote over the world SERPs or Internet. 

1. Write great content
Just write some great content naturally in Microsoft Word, don’t worry about keywords or anything like that. A good website should have upwords of ten pages each page should have at least 150 words but preferably 400-600.

2. Keywords
Choose some keywords that you want to rank high for. The best way to find out the most searched keywords is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Then choose one or two of the keywords for each page and make sure these keywords are used in the page title and the h1,h2 and h3 headings and throughout the page content. Don’t overcrowded the page with too high a keyword density and there is no need to start counting the number of keywords in your content just have them wherever it makes sense.

3. Internal links
Internal links are links to different pages in a website. They tell the search engine what the different pages are about as well as helping visitors to navigate around your site. When you are creating internal links you need to use keywords in them, never create internal links that say click here or read on if you linking to a page titled SEO advanced then use that title or the keywords in that page like search engine optimzation.

4. Incoming links
Search engine optimization is now a popularity contest because Google have changed their algarythem(the way they search and rank web pages). They changed this because people were abusing their search engine by packing their websites with keywords or doing link swaps(linking to another person’s website and them linking back). Although these are perfectly legal they weren’t bringing up the best results for searchers. So now the most important part of SEO is imbound links from other related and well ranked websites. So how do you get these links when it seems they are out of your control. One way is to write articles about topics in your site and publish them to relevant websites or article publishing sites.
       Make sure to link back to your website in these articles these links should also contain keywords. Another way is to join some social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc and link back to your site, you can also ask your friends on these sites to link to you. Of course the most effective way to gain links is to write great content people will want to recommend but make sure to get these people to link to using keywords. This is key in helping the search engines rank you higher. For example if you search click here in Google, Adobe will come up number one this is because so many people link to Adobe with click here. The best way to get people to link to you using keywords is to ask them in your content or to provide links for them although this will require some coding skills.

5. Create and submit a site map
When you have built your site and are happy with your content you need to create a site map as it helps the search engines crawl through your site. Here’s an example of a site map, if you are using Microsoft Web Expression then simply use a template and your site map page will be there for you if you aren’t using Web Expression then head over to gsitecrawler to create a free site map. Once you have created your site map then you need to submit it to Google manually you will also need to submit it to the other search engines just search for the search engines webmaster tools.

6. Meta tags and headings
Every page needs it’s own title meta tag e.g. The title of the page, lots of keywords the page also needs a keyword tag e.g. meta name=”Keywords” content=”all the keywords you want the page to rank high for with the most important ones first”> and a meta decripton tag meta name=”Description” content=”This webs page explains how to rank higher in the search engines”> All pages also need h1,h2 and h3 headings these are the headings in bold on a web page not only do they look good to visiters they are crucially important to the seach engines all headings must contain keywords but remeber they need to be readable to the visiter. H1 headings are the larhest and are found at the top of the page.

7. Name your pages
You need to name your pages using keywords e.g. “www.websitename.com/keyword” as opposed to “www.websitename.com/book.html?isbn=9781590592045.”

8. Get Indexed
To come up number one on Google you have to be registered on Google or the other search engines. When you are happy with your SEO submit your site to Google in webmaster tools, and last thing to must give back feedback of this article!

On-Page Optimization Factors

On-Page factors are related directly to the content and structure of the website. This normally consists of pages written in the HyperText Markup Language but also applies to other document formats that are indexed by search engines, for example Microsoft Word or PDF formats. On-page optimization involves modifying keyword frequency in the URL, Title, Headings, Hypertext Links and Body text. It may also involve reducing redundant HTML codes (aka cruft) produced by Web page authoring tools and restructuring the site to produce better linked and focussed page content.

Many search engines now discount the weight given to on-page factors because they give too much scope for abuse by SEO experts. In theory the visible parts of a web-page are less prone to manipulation as they have to make sense to readers. However doorway pages with redirections and clever use of style sheets enable different content to be served to search engines and end users.

Each page should target between two and four keywords directly related to the contents. If you feel the need for more keywords then consider splitting your content into separate pages. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) should contain keywords, separated by hyphens without being too long, around 128 characters is probably a sensible upper limit for the entire URL. The Title tag should contain the keywords with no stop words but arranged to make sense.

&ltTITLE&gt On Page Optimization &lt/TITLE&gt

This should be the first tag in the Head section of the page. There is evidence that search engines give more weight to factors higher up the page. The content should be properly structured with the use of Heading (H1, H2, H3 etc) tags containing relevant keywords. Search-engines will only index a limited amount of text in HTML tags and using too many keywords will dilute the focus. Don't spam any of these tags, this won't be effective and could result in a penalty.

Many website designers spend a lot of time creating Keyword and Description meta tags. Although these may be read by search engines, for example the description tag is used by Yahoo! to provide a short description of the site in the Search Engine Results Pages, they are not used for ranking pages.

&lt META NAME="description" content="Optimizing On-Page Factors for Search Engine" &gt

Personally I don't bother with them as they bulk out pages for little real benefit. Both Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search will use the text they find on the page as a description so make sure your first header and sentence describe the contents. However some search engine watchers say that the new Microsoft search engine, currently in beta tests, puts some weight on meta-tags. There is also evidence to suggest that search engines give more prominence earlier in the page and some engines will only index a limited amount of body text so making the first paragraph punchy is a good idea.

Image alternate-text tags (ALT tags) are only indexed where the image is part of a hyperlink. However ALT tags are useful for non-graphical browsing and should be employed correctly.

&lt IMG ALT="Description of Image" SRC="image.jpg" &gt

Comments are not indexed. Use bold/strong/italic attributes where appropriate.

Write natural copy aimed at the end user and not search engines. Don't worry too much about keyword density for the contents but take the opportunity to include keywords combined in different phrases and orders and create anchor text to related internal pages. Keep the number of links to fewer than 50, and probably less and don't repeat identical outbound-links. Theme related pages should be at the same level in the site hierarchy and be linked through the site's menu structure and site map. At least one page at the same level should link back to the home page so that search engines that have traversed a deep-link can index the rest of the website.