Bonehead SEO» one way link building

Give Your Business Credibility with Google Knol

Kristine — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:29:28 +0000

Google Knol has been available now for over a year and since that time they have passed well over 100,000 Knols that users have created for themselves and for their businesses.

At first, many thought it was a direct competitor to Wikipedia, however, the more you get to know knol (say THAT ten times fast), the more you begin to realize that it leans to more the side of a Squidoo or Hubpage.

That said, here’s some quick and easy tips to creating your own free Knol and what it can do for you.

A “Knol” is a “unit of knowledge”. And you can create a Knol on any topic you can come up with. Unlike Wikipedia however, where anyone can add to the content, with a Google Knol, people can still add to your content but you have to approve it first…needless to say this will cut down on the amount of spammy content you might otherwise receive.

Here’s how it can help your business get better rankings.

One of the benefits to having a Knol is that you can, without regard, actually use it to promote your own products and websites. If you’ve ever used Hubpages before, you know that they’re sticklers when it comes to linking up your content…even if it promotes your own site and Squidoo isn’t much better although it does allow for a lot more wiggle room.

Google Knol even states in their policy “You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service, unless you are in Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan. There are some commercial uses we don’t allow. We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website. We also don’t allow Knol pages that have the primary purpose of profiting from displaying ads from any publisher network, such as pages created with little or no unique content that exist only to display ads.”

And if you wanted another reason to start a Knol of your own, consider this. When Google first opened up Knol it said that it would no follow the links on the Knol pages…however, this is no longer the case.

But don’t think that all of your links will automatically be followed by Google. You now have to earn “trust” with Google in order to get your links followed. They state that “they are now at a point where we “trust” a certain fraction of authors and a certain proportion of user contributed links, and so we now use a “follow” directive for links within such Knols.”

Some links however, will permanently remain no follow including:

Links within comments
Our [Google's] automatically generated links to “similar content on the web”.
Brand new pages and recently-added authors are liable to remain “nofollow” for a period of time.

Although they don’t state what that period of time is.

Here’s how to start your own Knol…

Sign in using your Google account (or get one if you don’t already have one) and simply follow along with the instructions. It’s a very easy-to-use interface that anyone can follow.

When you’re ready to start writing, you’ll want to use some general SEO techniques such as:

Title – Like a web page on your site, use a keyword here.
Sub-title – Like a sub-heading on your web pages. Use additional complimentary keywords here.
Summary – This is where a little bit of copywriting experience comes in. You’ll want to entice anyone finding your Knol to read further…so make it appealing.
Publishing Mode – your Knol will not be published until you actually tell Google to publish it. On the right hand side of the page is a section that says “Author controls” where you can click a button to publish your Knol.
If you don’t want to moderate comments on the Knol, change this under “permissions” on the right hand side.
The default setting for a Google Knol is to give the Knol a Creative Commons Attribution license. I talked about this at the very beginning of the newsletter. You can change this to the other methods you’re given.

Now, in addition to the basic steps outlined above, here are a few more ideas that will move you ahead of the pack.

Google gives high quality Knols badges and awards. Items such as “Top Viewed Knol Award”, “Top Viewed Author Award”, “Top Pick Knol Award”, and “Top Pick Author Award”. But in order to get these badges, you need to keep your Knol “better than the rest”.

Here’s how to do that:

Keyword optimize your title – discussed above.
Optimize your content – just like your web pages use the keywords you want to rank well for at the beginning of your Knol. Use keywords throughout your content and work in related words and phrases centered around that topic. When you link out to your own site, be sure that you use those keywords in your anchor text.
Don’t try to fake your way through a Knol. If you know about your topic, you’ll have a much better chance of getting seen. If you don’t, I suggest you beef up on the topic you’ll be writing about.
Use engaging elements in your Knol. Use things like videos, images, audios, documents, spreadsheets, calendars and more.
A Knol is NOT a blog! A Knol provides high-quality information presented from all sides of the issue. It is not the place to blatantly promote your own products (although you can link to them), but rather it’s a professional resource that covers all facets of the information you’re presenting. If you aren’t sure how to write your Knol in a professional manner, visit the Knol’s that have already earned badges and see how they spoke about their content, what they added, how they presented their information. And then use that framework to speak on your own topic.
Keep it updated!!! Fresh content is a plus when it comes to a Knol.

Lastly read http://knol.google.com/k/peter-baskerville/how-to-write-knols-that-rank-top-10/14j3i4hyjvi88/19# which explains to you how to write a Knol that ranks in the top 10.

Additionally, here’s another top Knol tip for you that a lot of people aren’t currently aware of. Google is currently experimenting with Text to speech on their Knols. What this means is that right now, only a handful of high-quality Knols have the “listen” option which will read the Knol to the visitor.

Since Google is only choosing a small number of Knols to experiment with at this time, there are some tips you can follow to be sure that if and when this becomes an option for you that it reads well for your audience.

Don’t use contractions in your Knol. Use “we are” instead of “we’re”, “you are” instead of “you’re”, cannot instead of “can’t”, etc.
If your Knol has some kind of image or chart this cannot be translated into audio. So when using visual aids, be sure that a full explanation of that visual aid is available for those who cannot actual view it but rather are listening or have downloaded the Knol audio into an MP3 format.

Link Building for Bing

Kristine — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:25:17 +0000

Ever since Microsoft came out with their new search engine Bing, there have been lots of buzzing about it. And good buzz at that…not what people expected to see which was just a name change from “Live.com” to “Bing.com” and nothing more.

But Bing has taken a lot of people by surprise and now that Yahoo! has agreed to use Bing’s search results as their own search engine (thus taking the number of major search engines down to 2), it’s a very big deal and has great potential to be a big competitor for Google.

Just for the record, the use of Bing’s search results at Yahoo.com probably won’t come to light until sometime in 2010 or beyond, but it is something to start taking notice of right now.

Because we know that this change is coming, we can be fully prepared for it. And that means doing a few things to be sure that our websites are on top of these changes starting today.

I’ll be covering Bing in sections during the upcoming newsletters but for now, I want to focus on one of the more crucial elements of getting listed well in Bing and this is where your linking strategy comes into play.

Unlike Google who tends to keep information on ranking well in their search engine pretty close to the hip, only divulging just enough information, Bing seems to be moving in the opposite direction. While not full-disclosure by any means, Bing does give you a lot of tips and ideas when it comes to ranking well with them.

So let’s take a look at what Bing considers to be important where linking strategies are concerned.

The do’s and the don’ts.

While some of the do’s and don’ts of link building will seem familiar to you if you’ve engaged in link building where Google is concerned, some of the advice through Bing is easier to understand… and truly gives a “no bones about it” kind of approach.

So, let’s cover what these do’s and don’ts are.

DO – Link TO (that is from your own site) other websites that your site visitors would find helpful and useful. When you link to another site you are telling your site visitor that you “endorse” that site, so be sure that you actually do. Don’t link to a website just because it’s your Mom’s or you promised a friend you would link to them. If it isn’t helpful and complimentary to your own, skip it.

Do – Link to other sites that are relevant to your own. A wedding cake website linking to a tuxedo rental website would be relevant. A local coffee shop linking to a PPC marketing product would not be relevant. The same holds true for those links that point to you – granted you can’t control who links to you, you can influence this to an extent. IF you are engaging in a link-building campaign where you ask other site owners to link to you, be sure that those sites are relevant to your own.

Do attempt to get high-quality links pointing to you. Quantity is NOT the same thing as quality. This also holds true for Google. Just because you have thousands of incoming links to your site does not mean that you’ll rank well. What matters is the quality of those links. A thousand poor low-quality links cannot equal the ranking power of one high-quality link.

Do not participate in site-wide linking strategies from “bad neighborhoods”. Search engines know what a bad neighborhood is because the bad neighborhoods give off certain signals. Bad neighborhoods often consist of families of websites that all link to one another, have little to no content in and of themselves and often cover every kind of topic under the sun.

You want links from authority sites – those sites that are older (and thus “more reliable” as stated by Bing), have had consistent content on them over time and have high quality links pointing to their site as well as away from their site.

You can use this tool – http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm to help you determine if a neighborhood is “bad” or not.

Do use proper canonicalization. This means that you use one style of URL for every link within your site. If you remember in a past blog post I had talked about how the search engines view different variations of your URL as different domains all-together.

This means that http://YourSite.com and http://www.YourSite.com are viewed as two separate URLs. Why this is detrimental to you as the site owner, is because the importance of your websites are then spread across two domains instead of one – thus reducing the importance of your website in the search engines eyes.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, you can’t control how others link to you and they will use a vast number of ways to point to your URL which the search engines will all consider different UNLESS you set up a 301 redirect on each of the subsequent domain names.

So for instance if you wanted http://YourSite.com to be your primary URL that you referred people to and that you used consistently as absolute links on your own site, then…

www.YourSite.com
YourSite.com/
www.YourSite.com/
YourSite.com/index.html
www.YourSite.com/index.html
etc.

All need to have a 301 redirect set up on them that point to the URL you want to be your “main” URL. In this case, YourSite.com. Whenever you link within your own site, always, ALWAYS use the YourSite.com or whatever URL you have determined to be your primary URL.

Additionally use absolute links everywhere on your site. An absolute link means that you actually place the “http://www…whatever your site is.

For example, if you had a page on your site named “espresso-beans.html” and you linked to this page from any other page on your site, it should look like this: http://www.YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html“> Espresso beans and NOT Espresso Beans .

This is referred to as an “absolute URL” and as Bing states “The use of absolute links reinforces the use of your full URL and, like canonicalization, focuses the link juice to that URL.”

When linking to your home page within your own site, use the trailing slash and omit the “index.html” or “default.html” whatever the name of your default home page is. For example:

http://www.YourSite.com/ and not http://www.YourSite.com (notice the lack of the trailing slash.)

Bing also suggests that you use the title attribute within your internal links. For example:

title=”keyword or key phrase describing the page you’re linking to“>Anchor text link (also the keyword or keyword phrase) .

For sites that use dynamic linking (in other words pull descriptions and item numbers from a database), you know that the URL to those pages can get quite long. Do a search on Amazon.com for any book title and then take a look at the URL in your address bar. As you can imagine, these kinds of links can make a search engines job quite difficult.

In order to help the search engines use a more user-friendly version of that URL so that they don’t have to do a lot of hard work understanding the link, add some special code into the head section of your web page that will tell the search engines which canonical URL to use.

Ex: And be absolutely certain that this link actually points to the page you want it to go to and that it WORKS.

Bing suggests to use the nofollow tag on your links if you don’t want them to follow that link. However, if you want to block an entire page of links from being crawled, instead use the meta robots tag to block access to that content or use a robots.txt file.

What a nofollow tag looks like:

Espresso beans .

What a meta robots tag looks like:

(this tells the search engines to NOT index nor follow all of the links on the page this is located on.

You can also use:

which means that the search engines will still index your web page but they won’t follow any links on the page itself.

In summary, we know that the merger of search results between Bing and Yahoo! will be a significant step in the right direction where the search engines are concerned. And we’re also aware that Bing is starting to get lots of great feedback.

Since Bing is new, relatively speaking, they are handing you outright information that can help you rank better with them. Use these suggestions for your own site’s benefits. All of these suggestions will work well with Google as well…rarely do we see a big change of what’s allowed and what’s not where the search engines are concerned. But, Bing is a little more forthright with their information … which is something we haven’t seen in a long time with Google.

Where to Find & Get FREE Content & Links

Kristine — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:00:14 +0000

Google search now has a new advanced feature that allows you to locate content that you can use on your own website, for free. Oftentimes with the “OK” from the site owner to re-write it as you wish.

If you’re trying to establish yourself online, you might have found that locating content to use on your own website is difficult. There are PLR (Private Label Rights) products that you can buy and even full PLR memberships that you can purchase that will give you access to content to use at your discretion, but in many cases, not all mind you, they’re not typically of the best quality.

Aside from PLR products, you can always write the content for yourself which is very time-consuming or you can hire someone to do it for you; the higher the cost of the writer, generally, the better kind of content that you’ll get.

Now, while I will always advocate doing most of the work yourself, or at least having people who are trained by you do the work, even with PLR content, I also understand that writing day after day can suck away a lot of your time, when you can be using that time to create your own products or advertise your business or products your affiliated with.

That’s where a new Google Advanced search feature can work well for you in finding content to use as well as pull double-duty by generating links back to your site.

Here’s how it works.

First, visit Google.com. But before you search on anything click the link to the right of the search box entitled “Advanced Search”.

Next, enter in a keyword or keyword phrase at the top of the list just under the heading “Find web pages that have…” I suggest that if you’re locating content for use on your own site that you only enter in one keyword or keyword phrase related to the content you want to locate. When you use this search feature and you have multiple keywords in this area, the search will only pull back sites that contain ALL of these keywords.

Additionally you can also use the second option of “this exact wording or phrase” which will find the entire phrase in any web page or you can also use the third option of “one or more of these words:” where you can specify a variety of keywords and keyword phrases.

To make the job simpler for you, I would just use the first suggestion, and only search for one keyword or keyword phrase. If you’re using a keyword phrase, just place that phrase in quotes in the first search box.

Next, click the plus sign next to “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more.” And then narrow down your choices from what’s listed. The most important point here is the “usage rights” link. This allows you to filter content that allows you to do a variety of things with the content (and where all of the magic happens).

You have 5 options from this list. Here’s what they are and what they mean:

Not Filtered – Exactly what it means. The content you get using this search is not filtered in any way. Not recommended if you’re attempting to locate content to use on your own site.
Free to use or share – These pages are labeled “public domain” or carry a license that allows you to copy or redistribute its content, as long as the content remains unchanged.
Free to use or share, even commercially – The same as “free to use or share” but for commercial sites. So if you have a website that sells products, information or services, this is the option you want. Note that this does NOT allow you to modify the content.
Free to use, share or modify – This search will only pull back those web pages that are labeled with a license that allows you to copy, modify or redistribute in ways specified in the license.
Free to use, share or modify, even commercially. The same as “free to use, share or modify” but for commercial sites. When you’re looking to reuse content on your own site that you can re-word as you wish, this is the option you want.

Once you’ve entered in the terms you’re interested in and chosen a license, click search and Google will return to you a list of websites that have these criteria.

The one thing I recommend is to double-check the license itself. The way that Google is able to determine this kind of content is by using the “Creative Commons” filters. So once you’re at a web page that seems to have some content you’d like to use yourself, check for the “creative commons” license on the page. When you click on the license link, you’ll get more details about the license. The site may require you to link back to them in exchange for you using their content which can help boost their incoming links.

At this point you have to consider at least one thing – whether or not you want to link back to the site that has the content you want to use.

What this means to you in this instance, is to consider if it’s worthwhile to link out to the site whose content you want to use. If you don’t feel comfortable having the link on your web page then keep on looking through the search results that Google gave you to see if there’s a site that doesn’t require a link back to them. While few and far between, this little bit of extra work can mean a great deal of fantastically free content for you.

If you believe that the site will be a good resource for your site visitors, then by all means, link back to them. If you question it in the least bit, it’s best to refine your keywords and find a better resource.

On the flip side of this coin…you might be wondering “Well, if this is how THESE sites are getting incoming links, how can I get one way links to my OWN site?”

Glad you asked! Here’s how to do that:

Visit http://creativecommons.org/choose/ and license your own work. You can also visit a website that is also using the license, click on the Creative Commons link or icon, and then scroll down the page that you’re taken to on the Creative commons site which lists the details of that sites license. If you’d like to use the same kind of license that the site owner is using, click the link that says “Use this license for your own work”.

My suggestion to you when making use of the Creative Commons license is to be careful what you’re licensing. If you only want to license a single blog post that you made (and it’s entirely your own work), then only place the license on that blog post and choose “text” from your list of choices at http://creativecommons.org/choose/ .

If you license your entire blog, then this allows all of the content on your blog to be used by anyone depending upon the license you chose to use.

The reason that choosing text, audio, video, image, or interactive when specifying your license at Creative Commons is because this allows your license to only be used on your text, or your audio, or your video, etc., not the entire blog as a whole.

Secondly, be absolutely 100% certain that it is your OWN work you’re granting a license for.

Using a Creative Commons license will help you generate links for your site because others will find that they can use your work as content for their own sites and, if you’ve specified in the license that they have to link back to you, can generate lots of relevant links back to your own web pages.

So the bottom line is, when you’re looking to find content to use on your own site, use the advanced search feature in Google to find those sites that allow you to use and modify their work. Ideally you’d like to find that content that doesn’t require a link back to their site, but, as I said, these are few and far between. Just keep in mind that if you do want to use someone else’s content, and they require a link back, be sure it’s a site you do in fact want to link back to.

Some Common & Not-So-Common Link Building Ideas

Kristine — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:41:21 +0000

What follows are are a few common & some not-so-common link-building ideas you can use that will get you headed in the right direction where incoming links are concerned.

Create a Video and submit it to the different video directories. Video will only continue to get more prominent as time goes on. It’s already estimated that 25% of online users view videos every single day – that’s a huge number. Plus, the added benefit of video is that the video market is far less saturated than the web page market. One simple search in Google for the highly competitive phrase of “internet marketing” brings back a whopping 95,000,000 web pages. However, that same term only produces 13,500 search results in Google video. Take advantage of this while you can.Make reference to your URL in the video’s description. A failure to do this will not get a link back to your site.While YouTube does not follow links back to their originating source, Google Video does (which by the way includes videos from YouTube, MetaCafe, Guba and more). Take advantage of it while you can.
Do you use Google Notebook? You should. Currently Google Notebook’s links are followed and, if you make your notebook public, will be indexed by Google.
Answer a question at Yahoo Answers. (http://answers.yahoo.com)People ask all kinds of questions on every topic imaginable here. Whatever your niche topic is, you’re sure to find someone asking a question about it that you can answer. Don’t forget to link back to your site as a resource.
Create a blog post with a helpful list. People LOVE lists. And they tend to bookmark them quite frequently.
Bookmark your own web pages at places like Delicious.com, Newsvine and Technorati. You can also use a service such as OnlyWire.com to do this for you. Don’t worry about the nofollow tags on some of the social bookmarking sites. Even though the nofollow won’t get you a link back to your site in the search engines, it can still get some eyeballs within the social bookmarking directory itself if you use the right tags in your bookmark. (Tags = Keywords).
Write Articles. Not as effective as it used to be but will still get links pointing to your site however they won’t be the best most authoritative links.
Get listed in a niche directory. It’s likely that your business caters to a specific niche; if it doesn’t you need to really consider doing so. Your niche will also very likely have niche directories that you can add your site to. Unlike larger directories like Yahoo and Google (who gets their directory results from DMOZ) that are general website directories, there are also niche directories that have less competition. Do a Google search for “your topic” + directory and see what comes up. If your niche website would fit well in that directory, and the directory has a decent PageRank and a fair amount of pages indexed, add your site.
Link Build With Images. Places like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) for example, allow you to place photos within their directory, give those photos tags relevant to your niche and use keyword-rich link text within the description. For example, if I ran a Wedding Cakes business, I could upload photos of “wedding cakes” use keywords related to those wedding cakes to tag my photos and use within my anchor text.
GIVE, GIVE, GIVE. Believe it or not, the more you GIVE away, the more people will link to you. This could be a free report, free ideas, tips, whatever your target market would find helpful and useful.
Niche Websites. Does your niche have a website that people visit often? For example, if you’re a WAHM (work at home Mom) or a WAHD (work at home Dad) there are a wide variety of websites available that talk about this topic. See if you can’t be a “guest blogger” or contribute an article to them free of charge in exchange for a link back to your site.
Talk. Do you like to talk about your topic? Use places like BlogTalkRadio.com and host your own radio show. People will find you and subsequently visit your site. This is a great way to get links.
Review a Product. Is there a product you’ve used recently that you liked? Ask the site owner if you can give a testimonial and then see if they’ll link to your website.
Make a Google Gadget. One very overlooked way to get potentially thousands of people to your site and linking to you is to create your own Google Gadget – you can read more about how to do this at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/. I recommend you take some time to see what the more popular gadgets consist of first – are they funny? Useful? Helpful? Fun? Incorporate these same ideas into your gadget so that they’ll get viewed (and used).

No related posts.

One Way Link Building

Kristine — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:46:32 +0000

One of the holy grail’s of online marketing and SEO is getting good incoming links to your site. Ideally links that don’t require a link back; also known as one way links.

But, as more and more people get familiar with, and use, the nofollow tag, these quality incoming links are getting harder and harder to come by.

Let me explain. A few years ago Google endorsed the “nofollow” tag within your links. This meant that any link you had on your website or blog that you didn’t want Google to follow, if you simply placed the rel=”nofollow” parameter within your link tag, Google would not follow that link to its destination page.

You might wonder why a website owner would choose to do something like this.

Well, there’s a few reasons:

The web page that the nofollow link is located on may not want to pass link juice. For example, if a web page has a PageRank of 6 every link located on that page gets a piece of that PageRank passed on to it and the web page owner might not want to give all links on that page a portion of its link juice instead choosing to keep all or most of the link juice for themselves.
The web page may have affiliate links on the page that they don’t want search engines following. If a search engine sees that you are linking out to lots of affiliate sites, they may devalue your page. Therefore, by using the nofollow parameter, these links don’t get followed back to the affiliate’s page.

However, there are still people online who don’t use the nofollow tag in their links. Whether this is by design or simply not knowing any better and it’s these pages that you want to locate so that you can get a true incoming link to your site.

That being said, here’s how to find sites that do follow your link.

It’s important to note here that if you find a blog related to your site’s content that you’d like to leave a comment on, be sure that the comment holds some value. Don’t simply post a non-sensical message just for the sake of getting a link back to your site.

Here are some dofollow blog directories that list blogs that all follow your link:

DoFollowBlogs – http://www.dofollowblogs.com
FollowList – http://www.followlist.com
DoFollowDirectory – http://www.dofollowdir.com
DoFollow Blog Directory – http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/dofollow/
DoFollow – http://www.dofollow.us

And if you’re looking for a list of blogs aside from a directory that do follow, check out these resources:

WhyDoWork.com – http://www.whydowork.com/blog/blogging-tips/558/
BumpZee – http://www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow/blogs/

Lastly, there are many blogs who have downloaded and used the CommentLuv Wordpress plugin. What this means is that these people who are using this plugin have specifically chosen to follow links posted on their blog.

This source gives you a comprehensive list of blogs that are all using the CommentLuv Wordpress plugin.

And if you’re curious how you too can add the CommentLuv plugin to your Wordpress blog, visit http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/commentluv-wordpress-plugin.

And lastly, if you want to be sure that a blog or site is still following links, you’ll want to download a Firefox plugin that will highlight all of the nofollow links on a page. This allows you to see at a glance which sites are following and which ones aren’t. I created a video a while back to show you how this works.

Don’t be shy! Do you know of more resources that list blogs or sites that do follow? Let us know by commenting below.