GPWA Times Magaine - Issue 23 - February 2013

B. High importance* • Link velocity trend – In the past building too many links too fast was considered a bad thing to do. Based on the winners and losers this is not true. The winners added nearly 400 links per month on average while the losers lost links. Be very aggressive on links between now and the next ma- jor update. ( Hint – Site-wide links on authority websites are golden. If you are in competition with any big players/websites you must set a proper budget aside for these types of links. I identify these high-value sites by analyzing my competitors’ back links and their trust authority. I spend 20-40 percent of a budget on these links. Be sure they are on relat- ed sites, they use brand as keywords [if you have a brand] and link half of these links to the front page and the rest to internal links.) • Domain popularity – I call this the Links^3 or “Links to links to links.” Who links to the sites that link to you? Are they relevant? This is a perfect case for back link evaluation and getting anchor text changed. You can also run page strength reports on your site and find the strongest pages for the key- words in the back link that you have from big and well-established websites. ◦◦ Winners had TWICE the average number of links from very big (and established) websites. ◦◦ This is about the time I start doing press releases and looking for guest posts to do or good links I can buy. ◦◦ Domain popularity is: · Traffic to the site · Link to links to the site · Top results for KW titles *Courtesy of LinkResearchTools.com. Note – Regarding link buying: I do most of mine through teliad LinkAd- age or Intellilinks or someplace I can measure the strength of a link. It is important to note that the number of outgoing links dilutes/degrades the value of your link so I look for under 10 outbound links maximum and I also make sure the other outbound links on the page are pointing to related pages and not to unrelated websites. Tip 6 » Use Google’s disavow tool Plan a full week to do back link analysis. Proper back link analysis of your website and your competitors’ websites will take this long. It is a good investment. Google has released the disavow tool, which allows website owners to report bad links and get them ignored by Google. This is great for many websites in gambling and competitive industries because in the past “Google Bowling” has hurt many websites. “Google Bowling” is when your competi- tor points a bunch of bad links at you. Buying 0 value links with “porn,” “Viagra” or other related negative terms through companies like TextLinkAds and Text- Links.com for $1 is a known method. Buy- ing programs likeHREFER,Market Samu- rai or SEnuke and setting themup to target your competitor with nasty links could not be prevented by Google and we have been asking for this type of tool for years. The only other option was to identify the back link, block the IP and notify Google and hope they read the e-mail or act on it and ignore these links. That doesn’t happen . Tip 7 » Limit ads When Panda was released rumors circu- lated that too many advertisements could hurt your rankings. We did some testing at that time and found that some of our rankings had fallen on high-ad content websites. The same testing done recently on the Penguin 3.0 update and the results showed no impact of too many advertise- ments on a website. It also didn’t show that running AdSense or spending money on AdWords had any effect at all – neither negative nor positive. I prefer the safe route and I am selective on what banners I place and where I place them. I never place them on the front page unless the offer from the advertiser is exceptional. I am different from many people when displaying banners, selling links and AdSense or AdBrite types of advertise- ments. If I receive a certain amount of traffic I know whom to talk to that will pay for the real estate (placement on my site) and what the traffic is worth to them. This type of advertisement is ac- ceptable to me. I just do not like advertising. Users don’t like it either. And I really haven’t made enough money from advertisements to justify taking the chance of drawing atten- tion, or worse, a penalty. Tip 8 » NoFollow all outbound affiliate links Most CMS programs have a NoFollow tool as a plug-in/widget option. • PR funneling – my testing shows it still works in some cases. • Cancel a funnel by using a NoFollow tag. • Check banner and link codes for hidden links. Remove them or add a NoFollow. • Outbound links to trusted sites build authority (DoFollow). • Max outbound links per page = 15. • NoFollow useless index/front page links: About Us, Terms & Conditions, Payment, Log In, etc. Tip 9 » Create multiple file types Search isn’t just written content on your website as it was in the past. Videos, PDF files/white papers, images, articles/ press releases and social media make up 40 percent of the traffic to a website with a healthy profile. I use Camtasia for videos, Jing for images, Adobe Pro 7.0 – 10 for creating PDFs and Marketwire and PRWeb for articles and press releases. ( Hint – The links in PDF files are live links.) Note –Don’t forget to create a newsitemap andmanually submit through Google. I use Xenu, which is ancient but works perfectly and it’s free. You can also schedule it to run daily or weekly and automatically upload it to your website via FTP. Tip 10 » Use breadcrumbs – breadcrumbs>are>these>things Use breadcrumbs that follow your “KW Silo” and your site navigation. This helps the end-user as well as the robots. WordPress has a widget made to create silos. This also helps in tracking your silos after time goes by and you have added many pages. Tip 11 » Install automated XML sitemap creator You should be adding content every day so you need a sitemap generated every day. You are targeting “fresh” markets and hot trending events to identify product or 33 Top 12 SEO tips for 2013