Listed below are SEO best practices to increase referral traffic and link building. I provided tools that will help you to achieve good results and keep you out of harms way from bad sites.
Social Engagement Building: This is an affective way to build online reputation. Select the most popular social networks like; Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon and create a profile. By doing this you can extend your network online, connect with your friends, share other websites and blogs with each other, promote your website or blog and build an online reputation. It’s important not to share the same website or blog all the time as this will make others think you’re a spammer.
In the past, many social networks would pass a vote for your website also known as a back link or incoming link. This is a popular way to increase your websites Google Toolbar Rank. Unfortunately many of these social networks now have the no-follow attribute because of the ongoing spam within these networks.
Social engagement is important as a reputation model and shouldn’t be considered as an easy way to build incoming links from external sites.
Blog Commenting: This is the most effective link building method. You can promote your blog/website by posting comments in other service-related blogs which allow links in the comments section that are crawlable by the search engines (these blogs are commonly identified as Do-Follow Blogs).
Directory Submission: This is still a great method to use for link building, but you need to be careful on what directories you submit to. If you submit to a directory that is red flagged by Google, you are putting your website in danger of being blacklisted. It’s important to perform manual directory submissions and never sign up with an automated directory submit bot. It’s important to choose the right category for each directory you choose to submit to. You should also submit your website or blog to the top directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, ZoomInfo, etc.
Forum Postings: This is another great way to build back links. You need to be an active member of the forum related to your blog or website. You can post/reply to a thread in other service-related forums that allow links in your signature which can be crawled by the search engines (Sign up on forums that are “Do-Follow Forums”). This is very time consuming and requires commitment.
Photo Sharing: Publish/share your website product pictures and make them public. Let your friends see them and comment on them too, which will help drive traffic towards your website. The most popular photo sharing websites are Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc.
Video Promotions: Like with photo sharing, you can publish/share your product videos, expert opinions, and reviews of your product and make them public in YouTube, Metacafe, etc. This is an effective way to drive traffic to your websites.
Article Submission: Write articles about our services and promotions and submit them to popular article sites like Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, Buzzle, etc. This will help attain some deep links to your website or blog.
Search Engine Submission: Submit your website or blog to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alexa, Lycos, Excite, etc. In most cases this is not that important because Google and Yahoo will already have many of your pages indexed already.
Classifieds Submission: Submitting to classified ads is a great way to advertise your products and services. The method that works best is reverse marketing. This is when you reply to a person who is looking for your products or services. Many classified submissions are free. The most popular is Craigslist.
Answers: Participate in Answers by answering relevant questions within your niche and placing a link to your website in the source section. This is another great way to increase link popularity (Yahoo Answers).
Tools
Search Status Add-on for Firefox: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.
NoDoFollow Add-on for Firefox: Just a simple extension to highlight links in a page according to nofollow / dofollow status. A link that is blue is dofollow whereas a link that is pink or light red is nofollow. In order to turn this feature on go to Tools at the top of your Firefox browser and click on NoDoFollow.
Web of Trust Add-on: This add on is a great way to see if a site in your search results is safe to explore. This will help identify bad directories when you submit your website or blog to online directory services. MyWot.com provides a Firefox and IE extension. The WOT community has rated millions of websites so you can search, shop online and surf for fun without worrying. There are more than 6 million active users who have rated over 314 million sites!
How to check for all pages in Google linking to your website: To check for all incoming links, open Google and in the search box put the following;
link:yoursite.com –site:www.yoursite.com (Note: Google does not support appending further refinements onto this operator such as excluding links within the same site).
In Yahoo use: linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com
Backlink Building Tools: This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.
Directory service for building backlinks: A manual directory submission service. This service is free.
Directory Submission service: Another manual directory service. This service is free.
What SEO Off Page strategies do you practice?
Nicely put together Frank. This Backlink Building Tool looks interesting but their page doesn’t give many details. Have any experience with it?
Jonathan,
After playing around with it for a bit, I found it to be useful, but there are others that are better. I will follow up with another article on this soon.
Interestingly, before I got to reading the sites you listed under article submissions, I was Googling nofollow links nowpublic articles, because some of the articles have dofollow links, and others are nofollow, and this article popped up in the results at #7. I wonder what makes the links dofollow on their network?
Great tips though on off page SEO. I have steered away from directory submissions recently, except for DMOZ. It’s hard to tell when the seemingly good directories will start just letting crap in just because someone paid for it. Even the FollowList dofollow directory has some sites that are recently added, but not even blogs.
Kristi,
Thank you for the comment. Directory submissions needs to be handles carefully. Many of these directories could put your site in danger of being flagged by Google. make sure you use the mywot.com add-on.
Many-Many Thanks! and Best of Luck ! Frank
Really I found It very useful information. I was searching that how to do directry submission and how to prepare blog and your tips got me nice information.and if you have any tips for blogging that how to prepare etc. pls send me.
I am using the other two firefox addon but I didn’t know about Web of Trust Add-on. Will definitely be using it. Thanks for the info.
WOT add on is an excellent tool for analyzing reputation and safety of web sites and web pages generally not just for SEO purposes.
As for SEO tools, I found SeoQuake to be quite good too.
Sandrina,
I like SEOQuake as well and there are others I use as well.
I think the NoDofollow addon is no longer available for the latest version of Firefox. I have tried to find it as it really useful for me. However, i still fail to find another good tool for the same function. Thanks for sharing! I have learnt a lot of new SEO knowledge from this article.
KS,
I am using the NoDoFollow on FF 3.6 with no issues.
Awesome post…. its used for everyone and hope for sharing.. thanks a lot.
Good post. I’ve been focusing on article posting in recent months, and I’ve also started participating actively in social media. Ezinearticles.com gives a high-page-rank link back to my sites.
Submitting your site to the search engines is almost a no-brainer, but I’ve known people to forget to do it.
John,
Article submissions are a great way to get backlinks from highly ranked sites. Thank you for your comment!
All the basic things are clearly stated in the post. I think we can use social bookmarking sites and web 2.0 sites can be used for building links so that we might get high pr links.
Thanks for the post.
Great tips. I didn’t realize that inclusions in red-flagged directories could get you in trouble. How would one determine if a directory is one of the bad ones?
Joshua,
Thank you and I am glad this article has helped.
these are really big search engines in the world, i always used these sites.thanks for sharing,
Some great tools there thanks.
One of my favourites is the G-Lock Blog Finder for blog commenting. It’s also Free for finding 50 relevant blogs.
Thank you and I am happy that you found the article informative.
Good luck!
I like good ole fashioned press releases for SEO. You might get lucky and also be picked up by a major journal/TV.
There are scripts that help you find DoFollow blogs. They will save you tons of time.
Fantastic list. I second your caution re directory submission – that can be effective but it’s important to avoid bad neighborhoods. Of course, if you were really at significant risk of being blacklisted, companies would be submitting their competitors to these directories all day long! But there is some risk, and a greater risk of just wasting significant time and capital. Our particular approach focuses on social media seo. We find that the mechanics are pretty straightforward, but the challenge is really in the sustained daily focus this type of effort requires. Thanks for the article.
Social media is much more safer than directories. You should only use directories when it’s absolutely necessary to gain additional link juice.