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- Google Domination | Illuminating SEO
Google Domination | Illuminating SEO
- By Illuminating SEO
- Published 03/4/2009
- Search Engine Optimization
- Unrated
You probably have heard all over the place that one of the keys at succeeding with Web 2.0 is to make everything appear as natural as possible to the search engines. By making your linking strategies appear more natural you rank more highly in the search engines and you are much less likely to have your sites banned, pages deleted, and your sites de-indexed.
There are many aspects of Web 2.0 that allow you to make your linking appear more natural. Many people simply create a pile of pages on social networking sites and bookmark them and have everything linking to the main page. The only thing they worry about is not gaining too many links in one day, but it still doesn’t appear natural! Here I will tell you how to use many aspects of Web 2.0 to make your linking strategies appear more natural to the search engines.
Diversification is key. You need to have links coming from as many different places and as many different types of places as possible. Here are the different methods you can implement to make your linking strategies appear natural.
Social Networking:
Social networking is an important part of your linking strategies. We both know this. However, you need to make sure that your linking appears natural. There are a few ways that you can do that with your social bookmarking.
The first thing you can do is make sure that the sites don’t just link back to yours. Link your pages to each other and to your main site, so it is not obvious that you are simply linking back to your site for backlinks. If every page only linked back to your site, then you would get screwed very quickly by Google, as it would be obvious once you Google notices 300 pages linking to your domain and nothing else. That is very unnatural, and will get you in trouble VERY quickly.
The second thing you can do is don’t always use the same sites. If you are always using the same sites, and always linking to the same sites, then Google will notice. It may take them a month or so, but you will get caught. Use one set of networking sites one time, and a different set of networking sites another time. Then use half of the first set of sites and half of the other set. Mix it up!
Don’t link to the same sites either. If your Squidoo lenses are always linking to your Wetpaint pages, it will get suspicious. Change up the linking structure and link to different places. If you forget about putting a link in, don’t worry about it! Just leave it alone! It will appear more natural.
Also, if you are using software to do a lot of the work for you (like SEnuke) and a site or two fails, then leave it alone! See if you can figure out why the site failed, and then fix it for the next run, but don’t change anything that you already did.
These mistakes make it look natural, which is exactly what we are striving for. (It also saves you time because you don’t have to keep going back and fixing things that went wrong.
Social Bookmarking:
Social bookmarking is probably one of the most discussed parts of Web 2.0. Everyone tells you to bookmark your pages and you will gain huge amounts of traffic.
We are also told to use bookmarking to gain backlinks to our websites. There are many different tools that have been created to help automate the process of bookmarking as many sites as possible in very little time. Some examples of these are Bookmarking Demon, which is the most popular bookmarking tool and is hailed as the best bookmarking software ever, Bookmark Generation, and SEnuke, which I personally use for my bookmarking, along with other functions.
So how do you make bookmarking look natural? First of all, don’t bookmark one page 10 times in one day. I have seen people do this, and it is just stupid. If anyone reading this bookmarks more than once/day, STOP! There are only a few situations when you should even bookmark once/day (which I explain in the Aggressive Marketing report) but most of the time you should bookmark once every two or three days. If you are trying to really make it look natural, then you should only bookmark once a week.
The second thing is to not create a new profile and immediately bookmark your page. Create a profile and then the next day or a couple days later bookmark your pages. The bookmarking sites will notice that your page is being bookmarked immediately after account creation. It just isn’t natural.
The third thing is to make sure that each of your accounts doesn’t have all the same sites bookmarked. It is pretty obvious if 50 bookmarking accounts all bookmarked the exact same pages, and if they were bookmarked in the same order then it is even worse. Don’t bookmark all of your pages with each account. Bookmark some with one account, some with another. This is a huge part of making your bookmarking appear natural.
The last thing, and probably one of the most important things with social bookmarking is to bookmark other people’s pages, and pages that are not all related to the same niche. The bookmarking sites can tell if you are bookmarking all of your own sites and no one else’s, and you may get banned.
So it is very important to bookmark other people’s pages that are related to yours, and other people’s pages that aren’t related at all. What I do is I comment on blogs or guest post on other people’s blogs and then I bookmark those pages. That way all the pages with my links on them have a little more power, sharing a little more juice with me and making my bookmarking appear very natural.
RSS Feed Submissions:
RSS feed submissions are fairly basic. You should submit all of your RSS feeds to the major directories, but the major thing is to not always submit them to all the directories. Again, if you are using software and it fails, leave it alone. It looks more natural that way.
Also, change up the tags a little bit. If you use all the exact same tags, it is pretty obvious that all the pages are from the same person and it doesn’t look natural.
Video Submissions:
Video submissions are a different style of marketing, but they are quite important for making it natural. With the video sites you can’t use anchor text on your links, so it is all just a basic link. Google likes to see these, and the video sites can have a lot of ranking power so they are a good place to get these links from.
With the video submissions you want to submit your video to many different directories, and you want to submit multiple videos. Make sure you use many of the same tags, but not all of the same tags in your videos.
If you are like me, and you are not good with videos and do not like doing video submissions, you need to do at least one, in order to have links from different types of sites. Google likes to see links not only from different sites but different types of sites, so make sure you submit at least one video.
Blog Commenting:
Commenting on blogs can be very powerful, but many marketers claim that it no longer works. However, I have found that it does work very well, and it also makes your linking look much more natural, especially if you comment on blogs not related to your website and blogs related to your website.
You can do searches for high PR do-follow blogs and make comments on them in order to gain more backlinks and more link juice. I personally do not like using auto-blogging software. This type of software just posts comments that aren’t
relevant and that will get deleted.
There is software you can use to find do-follow blogs, and this type of software is ok, but you need to actually make good posts (or hire someone to make the posts for you).
The way I do my blog commenting is this: I first find a do-follow blog to post on. The higher the PR of the blog, the more worth your time it is. Then I read through a post on the blog. Yes, I read the ENTIRE post because then I can make a better comment, not sound like an idiot, and not get my comments deleted by the moderator.
Once I have read the post, I read a few of the comments that other people have left so that I can see what kind of comments the moderator is allowing people to post on the blog. Then I post an INTELLIGENT comment on the article/blog post.
I also check the names of the people commenting. If people use keywords as their name, then I use keywords as my name. If everyone is using their real name, then I use my real name (or pen name, depending on what niche I am in). I also check to see if people are using signatures on their posts. If they are using signatures with links in them, then I will write a signature with an extra link in it.
Also, make sure you fill in the website box with your URL so that you get a backlink from each post!
Comment on blogs related to yours and blogs that aren’t related to yours. Blogs that are related to yours will do more for your rankings, but blogs that aren’t related make it appear much more natural to Google and do a lot for your rankings.
Forum Posting:
Forum posting is a good way to get more backlinks and to make your linking strategies appear natural. Forums allow you to include links in your signature, so every time you post you get a backlink to your website.
Some forums are no-follow for the signatures, which means you do not receive link juice from your backlinks, but you can still use these forums for traffic to your website, and you can use them to get backlinks if you play it right.
Start off by posting helpful comments on a forum and ask a few questions. Make yourself known, and after a week of posting one or two posts per day in that forum, you can post often post a new topic asking people what they think of your website. Ask if they can suggest improvements and just get people’s comments on your website.
This will get you a backlink from the post, and you may even get some good suggestions on how to improve your website so you can make more money!
Web Directories:
Web directories used to be all you needed to get good rankings in Google. Although this is no longer the case, they are still very valuable as part of your diversification strategy and there are many high PR web directories that will give you a lot of link juice.
Submitting to web directories is a lot like bookmarking a site. You must include a keyword rich title and description of the site. It is easy to submit to web directories. Two of the best are Dmoz and Jayde. If you want to find directories that are directly related to your niche, then simply do a Google search for these terms:
“Keyword” Directory
“Keyword” Resources
“Keyword” Submit Your Site
“Keyword” Add URL
“Keyword” Links
You can do these searches for multiple keywords to get as many results as possible and find many directories that are related to your topic, and therefore have more power.
These directories that are niche specific, and therefore have less outgoing links and are topically relevant so they carry more link juice than many generally directories. The larger directories such as Dmoz and Jayde carry more weight, as they are much larger directories that carry much weight in Google.
By submitting to directories you can gain easy backlinks that will give you a lot of link juice and make your linking appear natural, as you are gaining links from other directories.
Blog Directories:
Blog directories are basically the same idea as web directories. If your main website is a blog, then you can submit it to blog directories as well as web directories. If your main site is not a blog, then you can do what many websites do and create a blog for your website and submit it to the blog directories.
Blog directory listings can rank quite highly in the search engines for low competition keywords. They follow the same format as web directories, so they are easy to submit to.
There are not nearly as many blog directories as there are web directories, so you do not have to do keywords searches to find them. You only have to submit to the major blog directories. All other ones will give you little to no results.
These are the blog directories you should submit to: http://www.blogcatalog.com, http://www.bloghub.com, http://www.blogarama.com, http://www.weblogalot.com, http://dir.blogflux.com, http://blogs.botw.org & http://portal.eatonweb.com
As far as I know, there are no other blog directories worth submitting to, but this list will get you some good results. Some of them will show up in the search engine rankings if your title and description are keyword rich, but the ones that don’t still give you link juice and traffic to your blog.
Press Releases:
Press releases are quickly becoming a powerful method of obtaining search engine rankings and traffic. If you write a good press release and submit it to the right places, you can get top Google rankings with your press release, and you will get link juice back to your main page, and you will get traffic from the press releases as well.
When you write a press release, you write it like a news report. Pretend you are writing a column for a newspaper. It has to be interesting, and it has to be something people want to know about. If it is good enough, you can even get into Google News, which can get you first page rankings for incredibly high competition keywords. I don’t know if you know this, but Google loves Google News. (I wonder why that is?)
You want to have one link in the press release linking back to your main site. Use anchor text whenever possible. If you really cannot write a press release, then hire an outsourcer to do it for you.
Once you have written your press release, submit it to PRWeb if you can. It costs $80, but it is definitely worth it. If you submit to PRWeb you have a MUCH greater chance of making it into Google News.
However, if you cannot afford to submit to PRWeb, then at least submit it to http://www.press-release-point.com and http://www.bignews.biz. There are many others, and you can search for them on Google, but these are two of the ones I have received the best results from. They cannot even compare to PRWeb, but they are much better than not doing it.
*SPECIAL TIP* If you feel that you should be getting more out of your press release, then once you have submitted it to the press release sites, treat it like an article! It is like a bonus article for you to use, so do with it exactly what you would do with any other article!
Podcasts:
Alright, I don’t know much about podcasts, and to be honest I haven’t really used them. However, I know that they can be powerful, especially because you have almost no competition whatsoever. Because I do not know anything really about podcasts, I will not lie and make up something I don’t really know about.
I know you can submit your podcasts to different podcast directories, and even get your podcasts into iTunes, which can work great for your marketing, but I do not know how to get the best results out of them. The key is, you need to diversify as much as possible, so podcasts are something you should look into.
(If anyone reading this has experience with podcasting and would like to write up a small report about it and give it to me to include here, I will put it in here and give you credit and you can get some exposure for your business and help out all the wonderful people reading this book. Oh, and maybe I will send you a nice little bonus specially from me! :)
There are many aspects of Web 2.0 that allow you to make your linking appear more natural. Many people simply create a pile of pages on social networking sites and bookmark them and have everything linking to the main page. The only thing they worry about is not gaining too many links in one day, but it still doesn’t appear natural! Here I will tell you how to use many aspects of Web 2.0 to make your linking strategies appear more natural to the search engines.
Diversification is key. You need to have links coming from as many different places and as many different types of places as possible. Here are the different methods you can implement to make your linking strategies appear natural.
Social Networking:
Social networking is an important part of your linking strategies. We both know this. However, you need to make sure that your linking appears natural. There are a few ways that you can do that with your social bookmarking.
The first thing you can do is make sure that the sites don’t just link back to yours. Link your pages to each other and to your main site, so it is not obvious that you are simply linking back to your site for backlinks. If every page only linked back to your site, then you would get screwed very quickly by Google, as it would be obvious once you Google notices 300 pages linking to your domain and nothing else. That is very unnatural, and will get you in trouble VERY quickly.
The second thing you can do is don’t always use the same sites. If you are always using the same sites, and always linking to the same sites, then Google will notice. It may take them a month or so, but you will get caught. Use one set of networking sites one time, and a different set of networking sites another time. Then use half of the first set of sites and half of the other set. Mix it up!
Don’t link to the same sites either. If your Squidoo lenses are always linking to your Wetpaint pages, it will get suspicious. Change up the linking structure and link to different places. If you forget about putting a link in, don’t worry about it! Just leave it alone! It will appear more natural.
Also, if you are using software to do a lot of the work for you (like SEnuke) and a site or two fails, then leave it alone! See if you can figure out why the site failed, and then fix it for the next run, but don’t change anything that you already did.
These mistakes make it look natural, which is exactly what we are striving for. (It also saves you time because you don’t have to keep going back and fixing things that went wrong.
Social Bookmarking:
Social bookmarking is probably one of the most discussed parts of Web 2.0. Everyone tells you to bookmark your pages and you will gain huge amounts of traffic.
We are also told to use bookmarking to gain backlinks to our websites. There are many different tools that have been created to help automate the process of bookmarking as many sites as possible in very little time. Some examples of these are Bookmarking Demon, which is the most popular bookmarking tool and is hailed as the best bookmarking software ever, Bookmark Generation, and SEnuke, which I personally use for my bookmarking, along with other functions.
So how do you make bookmarking look natural? First of all, don’t bookmark one page 10 times in one day. I have seen people do this, and it is just stupid. If anyone reading this bookmarks more than once/day, STOP! There are only a few situations when you should even bookmark once/day (which I explain in the Aggressive Marketing report) but most of the time you should bookmark once every two or three days. If you are trying to really make it look natural, then you should only bookmark once a week.
The second thing is to not create a new profile and immediately bookmark your page. Create a profile and then the next day or a couple days later bookmark your pages. The bookmarking sites will notice that your page is being bookmarked immediately after account creation. It just isn’t natural.
The third thing is to make sure that each of your accounts doesn’t have all the same sites bookmarked. It is pretty obvious if 50 bookmarking accounts all bookmarked the exact same pages, and if they were bookmarked in the same order then it is even worse. Don’t bookmark all of your pages with each account. Bookmark some with one account, some with another. This is a huge part of making your bookmarking appear natural.
The last thing, and probably one of the most important things with social bookmarking is to bookmark other people’s pages, and pages that are not all related to the same niche. The bookmarking sites can tell if you are bookmarking all of your own sites and no one else’s, and you may get banned.
So it is very important to bookmark other people’s pages that are related to yours, and other people’s pages that aren’t related at all. What I do is I comment on blogs or guest post on other people’s blogs and then I bookmark those pages. That way all the pages with my links on them have a little more power, sharing a little more juice with me and making my bookmarking appear very natural.
RSS Feed Submissions:
RSS feed submissions are fairly basic. You should submit all of your RSS feeds to the major directories, but the major thing is to not always submit them to all the directories. Again, if you are using software and it fails, leave it alone. It looks more natural that way.
Also, change up the tags a little bit. If you use all the exact same tags, it is pretty obvious that all the pages are from the same person and it doesn’t look natural.
Video Submissions:
Video submissions are a different style of marketing, but they are quite important for making it natural. With the video sites you can’t use anchor text on your links, so it is all just a basic link. Google likes to see these, and the video sites can have a lot of ranking power so they are a good place to get these links from.
With the video submissions you want to submit your video to many different directories, and you want to submit multiple videos. Make sure you use many of the same tags, but not all of the same tags in your videos.
If you are like me, and you are not good with videos and do not like doing video submissions, you need to do at least one, in order to have links from different types of sites. Google likes to see links not only from different sites but different types of sites, so make sure you submit at least one video.
Blog Commenting:
Commenting on blogs can be very powerful, but many marketers claim that it no longer works. However, I have found that it does work very well, and it also makes your linking look much more natural, especially if you comment on blogs not related to your website and blogs related to your website.
You can do searches for high PR do-follow blogs and make comments on them in order to gain more backlinks and more link juice. I personally do not like using auto-blogging software. This type of software just posts comments that aren’t
There is software you can use to find do-follow blogs, and this type of software is ok, but you need to actually make good posts (or hire someone to make the posts for you).
The way I do my blog commenting is this: I first find a do-follow blog to post on. The higher the PR of the blog, the more worth your time it is. Then I read through a post on the blog. Yes, I read the ENTIRE post because then I can make a better comment, not sound like an idiot, and not get my comments deleted by the moderator.
Once I have read the post, I read a few of the comments that other people have left so that I can see what kind of comments the moderator is allowing people to post on the blog. Then I post an INTELLIGENT comment on the article/blog post.
I also check the names of the people commenting. If people use keywords as their name, then I use keywords as my name. If everyone is using their real name, then I use my real name (or pen name, depending on what niche I am in). I also check to see if people are using signatures on their posts. If they are using signatures with links in them, then I will write a signature with an extra link in it.
Also, make sure you fill in the website box with your URL so that you get a backlink from each post!
Comment on blogs related to yours and blogs that aren’t related to yours. Blogs that are related to yours will do more for your rankings, but blogs that aren’t related make it appear much more natural to Google and do a lot for your rankings.
Forum Posting:
Forum posting is a good way to get more backlinks and to make your linking strategies appear natural. Forums allow you to include links in your signature, so every time you post you get a backlink to your website.
Some forums are no-follow for the signatures, which means you do not receive link juice from your backlinks, but you can still use these forums for traffic to your website, and you can use them to get backlinks if you play it right.
Start off by posting helpful comments on a forum and ask a few questions. Make yourself known, and after a week of posting one or two posts per day in that forum, you can post often post a new topic asking people what they think of your website. Ask if they can suggest improvements and just get people’s comments on your website.
This will get you a backlink from the post, and you may even get some good suggestions on how to improve your website so you can make more money!
Web Directories:
Web directories used to be all you needed to get good rankings in Google. Although this is no longer the case, they are still very valuable as part of your diversification strategy and there are many high PR web directories that will give you a lot of link juice.
Submitting to web directories is a lot like bookmarking a site. You must include a keyword rich title and description of the site. It is easy to submit to web directories. Two of the best are Dmoz and Jayde. If you want to find directories that are directly related to your niche, then simply do a Google search for these terms:
“Keyword” Directory
“Keyword” Resources
“Keyword” Submit Your Site
“Keyword” Add URL
“Keyword” Links
You can do these searches for multiple keywords to get as many results as possible and find many directories that are related to your topic, and therefore have more power.
These directories that are niche specific, and therefore have less outgoing links and are topically relevant so they carry more link juice than many generally directories. The larger directories such as Dmoz and Jayde carry more weight, as they are much larger directories that carry much weight in Google.
By submitting to directories you can gain easy backlinks that will give you a lot of link juice and make your linking appear natural, as you are gaining links from other directories.
Blog Directories:
Blog directories are basically the same idea as web directories. If your main website is a blog, then you can submit it to blog directories as well as web directories. If your main site is not a blog, then you can do what many websites do and create a blog for your website and submit it to the blog directories.
Blog directory listings can rank quite highly in the search engines for low competition keywords. They follow the same format as web directories, so they are easy to submit to.
There are not nearly as many blog directories as there are web directories, so you do not have to do keywords searches to find them. You only have to submit to the major blog directories. All other ones will give you little to no results.
These are the blog directories you should submit to: http://www.blogcatalog.com, http://www.bloghub.com, http://www.blogarama.com, http://www.weblogalot.com, http://dir.blogflux.com, http://blogs.botw.org & http://portal.eatonweb.com
As far as I know, there are no other blog directories worth submitting to, but this list will get you some good results. Some of them will show up in the search engine rankings if your title and description are keyword rich, but the ones that don’t still give you link juice and traffic to your blog.
Press Releases:
Press releases are quickly becoming a powerful method of obtaining search engine rankings and traffic. If you write a good press release and submit it to the right places, you can get top Google rankings with your press release, and you will get link juice back to your main page, and you will get traffic from the press releases as well.
When you write a press release, you write it like a news report. Pretend you are writing a column for a newspaper. It has to be interesting, and it has to be something people want to know about. If it is good enough, you can even get into Google News, which can get you first page rankings for incredibly high competition keywords. I don’t know if you know this, but Google loves Google News. (I wonder why that is?)
You want to have one link in the press release linking back to your main site. Use anchor text whenever possible. If you really cannot write a press release, then hire an outsourcer to do it for you.
Once you have written your press release, submit it to PRWeb if you can. It costs $80, but it is definitely worth it. If you submit to PRWeb you have a MUCH greater chance of making it into Google News.
However, if you cannot afford to submit to PRWeb, then at least submit it to http://www.press-release-point.com and http://www.bignews.biz. There are many others, and you can search for them on Google, but these are two of the ones I have received the best results from. They cannot even compare to PRWeb, but they are much better than not doing it.
*SPECIAL TIP* If you feel that you should be getting more out of your press release, then once you have submitted it to the press release sites, treat it like an article! It is like a bonus article for you to use, so do with it exactly what you would do with any other article!
Podcasts:
Alright, I don’t know much about podcasts, and to be honest I haven’t really used them. However, I know that they can be powerful, especially because you have almost no competition whatsoever. Because I do not know anything really about podcasts, I will not lie and make up something I don’t really know about.
I know you can submit your podcasts to different podcast directories, and even get your podcasts into iTunes, which can work great for your marketing, but I do not know how to get the best results out of them. The key is, you need to diversify as much as possible, so podcasts are something you should look into.
(If anyone reading this has experience with podcasting and would like to write up a small report about it and give it to me to include here, I will put it in here and give you credit and you can get some exposure for your business and help out all the wonderful people reading this book. Oh, and maybe I will send you a nice little bonus specially from me! :)
