USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

It’s now commonly known that having valuable, trusted link-ins do a lot for your site on search engines. SEOBook  put out an article that discussed 101 ways to build link popularity, which was an obvious, but helpful plug to gain more PR. No attempt is made to hide this since the first way they even point out that making a “101 list” as one of those 101 ways!

Number 9 on their list is pay-per-click (PPC), which can be incredibly helpful for big business, but for the individual hosting a fan site for an MMORPG, or a competing club in a city, this proves to be an incredible waste of money. Especially if their competitors know that they can manipulate the PPC system and cost you money.

Links into your site can be very hard earned, yet well worth it if you snag them. Of course, you don’t want to go bugging the site administrator for that link in if they’ve already said no. If they have a community, show that you can indeed be a helpful part of it and make some educated posts. Gaining trust is all part of the game, and the sooner you get it from the domains that have been around a long while, the better off you’ll be.

Gaining link-ins from sites that have nothing to do with yours will gain you little, if any, help in terms of search engine juice. For example, why would you want your site about boxing to be linked to a well ranked knitting site? It doesn’t make much sense for your business, and it doesn’t make much sense to search engines.

Syndication also proves to be a decent help. It’s hard content, it changes often (as often as the source updates), and if coming from a reputable source, will gain you some points. Setting up your own as well as trading syndication also works with others if you can get good trades.

SEOBook provides a lot of good tips and while they did provide warning on going to sue Google for publicity, I don’t think that should have been listed. Someone out there is bound to want to proceed with the same process and waste taxpayer dollars on it. If you win or not in the battle, you certainly will gain publicity in one way or another, but it might not be the publicity you want.

Design as a linking element should have included jquery. It’s visually appealing, requires very little coding, and can give sites an interactive edge against the competitor.

Andy Hagans throwing himself out there for hired help is of course something a businessman has to do. But linking to andyhagans.com four times within the same post is a bit much in my opinion. Yes, I do realize that I threw out his URL yet another time. Least I can do for the article he provided. Woah! Rules 1 and 5 taking effect right here. Well, the desired effect of rule 1 that is.

From SEOmoz and their article concerning tips to get domain diversity if you have any control over this at all, make sure that your link into your site has a valuable (though not cheesy) anchor text. For example, if you’re the ABCD Business that deals with cough drops in Seattle, you would want your link text to have your business name or a combination of “cough”, “drops”, and “Seattle”. Nothing too long, nothing too short. They suggest bit.ly to shorten a URL if you’re going to be posting it in places such as twitter if your link is too long.

Sometimes people will link to you on an article you wrote on a blog (that you should have by now!) and not even use an anchor tag to put a shorter link up for the reader, and instead use the actual URL. Hopefully the blog you’re using shows the title of your post in the URL so that when the anonymous person posts your link in a forum or blog post somewhere, you still get the benefit of those keywords showing up. For example, the blog title of SEOmoz’s  “8-tips-to-get-domain-diversity-with-the-anchor-text-you-want”. All of that is in the URL that will help overall. Finally, SEOmoz does have one cute kitten, which is always good to help you get links if you’re willing to stoop that low.

While the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) continues in Seattle today, some people are overlooking an equally important presentation that was given by Matt Cutts a few days ago at Wordpress’ WordCamp in San Fransisco.

The presentation that Matt Cutts gave at WordCamp has a lot of very helpful tips for bloggers who need to get an idea of what search engine optimization is all about. During the presentation, Cutts had a 50-slide slide-show about what SEO is, what to do, what not to do, and what he personally does on his own blog. Cutts showed the plugins he uses on his own Wordpress blog, and yes, he uses Wordpress, not the Google blog network.

Some of the stuff that Cutts talked about is obvious to more experienced SEOs, but it’s a short presentation that can’t hurt to check out. We at USASEOPros already do most of what Cutts was talking about, but it’s always good to be reminded by he who is the embodiment of the Google algorithm.

Basically, Cutts said to create good content, which is what you can expect from someone who works for Google. If you look and listen closely however, you can pick out some tips that go beyond what Cutts is paid to say. The slide-show presentation suggested learning how to identify and use alternate key phrases in your content, optimizing URLs, getting feed data, and a few other things that can be seen over at his blog. One person that should definitely be followed if you’re interested in SEO is Matt Cutts, but take what he says with a grain of salt: he is kind of the enemey of SEO.

The WordCamp event is for developers and users who want to know more about the product they’re involved with. It doesn’t matter whether you use the .org or .com version of Wordpress, both could benifit from the event. It was great to see that Cutts was there to throw in the knowledge he has, and there were also other speakers there to talk about non-SEO topics.