The last article we talked about the content of the site and how to write an article for SEO. In this article we are going to talk about where to put these article after they have been carefully written.

Blogging

First you want to open up a few blogs through some social media blogging sites like Tumblr or Blogger. The reason for this is because your going to be writing articles focused on your topic and is going to have links back your site. You will need a few places to put articles. There are many blogging sites out there.

Here are a few:

Tumblr

What their “about us” section says. “Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML.”

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google and is a place to start and customize your blog then you share it on the web.

Weebly

Weebly is a site to start your own website or blog without having to know code.

Article Directories

Now that you have a few blogs set up, the next thing you want to do is write a few good articles. In these articles place a backlink to your site. The link could be written in the actual article or even in the “written by” section. Once you have these articles written you then can submit them to article directories. If accepted into these article directories then they will publish them. When they publish your article then all those backlinks that you put into your article will be votes for your site.

I have found a few and here they are:

• http://ezinearticles.com/
• http://goarticles.com/
• http://www.articledashboard.com/
• http://knol.google.com/k

Social Bookmarking

My last point of how to get good backlinks is to use social bookmarks. Social bookmarking has become very popular lately. People want to see what other people are finding interesting and want to know what they are bookmarking. Every time you get your article bookmarked in these sites it counts as a backlink, and we know a backlink counts as a vote.

I have found a few to get you started:

• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Delicious

And Conclusion

Now these aren’t the only way to get backlinks but it’s a good start. I like to find ways to get backlinks while keeping my values. These all seemed to me that they were pretty strong, respectable ways to get backlinks.

This is going to be a two part article about how to use backlinks in articles to get better ranking in search engine results.

When I was trying to find information about backlinks I just typed in the search bar “backlinks seo”. The first four results were paid backlinks and after reading some of the articles that came up it seemed a bit sketchy, kind of like when buying a used car.

We are going to go over a few ways that may help you get good backlinks and why it’s important to have quality backlinks.

Backlink?

A backlink is a link that is placed on another site that links to your site. Whether this is a mention in an article or a link left in a comment. In relation to SEO, backlinks are essentially votes from other sites in the popularity contest for search engine recognition. Each backlink you have from another site is one more vote specifying how cool your site is.

Back to when I searched “backlinks seo”, I got a lot of results for paid backlinks. You may be thinking “Well that’s good right? You will get a lot of backlinks without having to do a lot of work.” Well, not quite. Having a lot of backlinks is important but whats more important is having quality backlinks. Quality backlinks are links from sites that have good reputation and the content is somewhat related to your content in your site.

When you buy backlinks and your site is new, you get thousands of backlinks within a few weeks and you could get blacklisted. Some search engines look at this spike in backlinks as unnatural.

So now that we have talked about why not to use the paid backlink sites, lets talk about how to get choice backlinks.

Spinning

Some of these are hard to get onto if your article isn’t unique. That brings me to another party foul. Spinning. I’m not talking about the dance; I’m talking about spinning articles. “What’s spinning?” you ask. Spinning is taking an article you wrote putting it into a program and it rewrites it for you. There are a few of these services out there, but I recommend you stay away from these unless you really know what your doing.

The reason people want to spin an article is so they can make as many articles out of a few articles and as little time as possible. The problem is, if it isn’t done well enough then the article directories won’t look at them as unique and it won’t be accepted.

Now that we have talked about how to write the content, part two of this article will talk about what to do with your written content.

Using SEO keywords is a great way to move up in the search engine results. If you use keywords properly you can get people to visit your site, but if you use them in an unethical way, you can get black-listed and taken off of search engine results.

Title

Make sure the title tag of the page has your keyword at least once. This is the first place that robots (spiders / crawlers) will look. It also helps the visitor know they are in the right section of your site.

Meta Tags

Use keywords in the meta tags. This includes the description meta tag along with the keyword meta tag. Stick to 150 characters in the meta tags. Google will not look at the keyword meta tag for keywords but most of the other search engines will.

Headings

Heading tags are very important for multiple things. They are needed for 508 compliant and of course to organize your page for your reader. When we talk about SEO, it’s another place to put a keyword. Use your keyword in your <h1> – <h6> tags.

Copy

When it comes to the actual copy of your page try and use your keyword throughout the page. But remember the important thing is to have good content that people want to read. The robots may index your site because of your keywords but people reading it will not stay if the copy is not good or doesn’t read well. The whole reason for having good SEO is to drive business, not just traffic to your site, and you can’t do that if visitors are bouncing off your site as soon as they arrive. Go back through after writing and reread what you wrote. If it feels like you are being redundant with the keywords, cut a few out.

Stemming

When creating keywords you can also do what’s called keyword stemming. Keyword stemming is using different variations of the word. An example would be “fish”, “fishing”, “fished”, and “fisher”. Search engines will pick up on the base of the word and using keyword stemming allows you to use the word more often and make it so the body is not so repetitive with the same keywords and adds a security blanket from being black-listed.

Images

Image tags are a good place to put keywords too. You need an alt tag if you’re doing 508 compliant so you might as well throw a keyword in there too. You can even use it in the title of the image.

File Naming

File names are another great way to use your keyword. Use no more than 50 characters for a file name. When naming your HTML files, using fewer characters makes it easier for the user to read and understand the path. Separate your keywords by dashes and do not use underscores or camel case. The search engines will read them as one word.

Conclusion

These are a few of the places that spiders and crawlers will look for information on your site. If you choose to only use one of these you will not get good results. It’s the combination of them that really affect the site and where it’s ranking.

In the past Google has had algorithms to determine where a website will show up in their search results. These algorithms were based mostly on backlinking and keywords. By using a combination of techniques, web designers, developers and content writers could get better Google ranking by.

The problem in the past is that some sites got high ranking when using these backlinking and keyword techniques. Sites could fool the algorithm into thinking that the site was more important or relevant to the searched item then it really was. Google has found a way to solve this issue, Panda.

Panda is a new system that now looks at your whole site, not just one page. Panda looks for a few different things that cannot be directly controlled by the sites designer, like the way visitors feel about the site. Now I say “directly” because you can’t force your visitors to think or react a certain way. It’s not like a survey that the visitor fills out every time they visit a site. Panda tries to determine the quality of the user experience. Here are a few things Panda looks at.

• Time on site – When a user comes to your site, Google tracks how long the user is on the site. The longer the user is on your site, the better Panda rank you will get

 

• Bounce rate – How often someone navigates to your site then leaves without diving further into the site. This shows Panda that your site is either not what the visitor was looking for, or not too confusing to navigate.

 

• Social shares – If a site has good information or a good article, people will love to share it. Panda looks at social networking sites (that don’t have the nofollow attribute). If your site or article is being shared, your rank goes up.

 

• Page views per visit – This is like Bounce rate, but goes into more depth of how many pages the visitor is actually viewing on your site. When the viewer visits more pages on your site, it shows Panda that the visitor isn’t loosing interest in the site.

 

• Brand specific searches – Once your brand name is out there and receives a good reputation, people will start searching you by name. The more that people do this and also navigate through your site, the higher your site will show in the results.

These are only a few of the things that Panda looks at, but you can see the pattern. If you keep people interested and keep them coming back, Panda will give you a better rank.

Because Google is so secretive about what actually goes into these algorithms they will not say exactly what to do to get better Panda results for your site. What they have released are a few questions that you can ask yourself when creating and writing your site.

More guidance on building high-quality sites (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html)

Now that we have an understanding of the positive things that Panda looks for on your site, let’s look at the things that Panda considers to be characteristics of low quality sites.

• Lots of ads – If the ads outweigh the content of the site, Panda looks at this as not user friendly and you will get points docked for this. Try and keep the ads to a maximum of 2 ads per page. A good rule is to think back to some sites that had ads that you liked and also sites that had ads that you didn’t like. Typically you are fine with a few ads just as long as they don’t distract from the content and are not above the fold.

 

• Quality content – Do not use spun articles. A spun article is an article that has been written and then thrown into a program that will change out some of the words. It is also considered an article that someone has taken and rewrote it to change the view of the article. Make sure to use unique and relevant articles.

 

• Low traffic sites – If you use a low amount of ads and original content and you are still not moving up on your search result, it may be a result to having little traffic to your site. Panda looks at this as, “Well if visitors keep coming back then they must enjoy the site.” So try and find fresh ways to keep visitors coming back.

 

• No moderation – Lets say you have a blog and have a large community participating in the blog post. If those posts and comments aren’t moderated then you might get spam backlinks from poor sites. Panda looks at this as if you are saying you support these sites and Panda will penalize you for it.

 

Now that we have a better understanding of what Panda is and the certain things that Panda looks for on your site, lets go kick some Panda butt.

What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Unlike the real world being beautiful isn’t enough to attract visitors. You need to know how to appeal to the search engines.

You want your site appear on the first page of the search results, because most viewers don’t even move onto the next page of results. People are more likely to visit your site if you are on the first page, compared to the second. This is why it’s important to utilize search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is about getting higher page ranks (moving up the search result list based on relevance to what keyword is being searched). If properly taken into consideration, then you will show up in the first page of results and get more traffic to your site and will keep visitors browsing with you.

There are a few different angles to approach this. I’m going to hit on a few of these.

Panda

Panda has been the new weapon that Google has launched to help bring more relevant websites to the average user. In this launch it has made it much harder to move up in the search results.

Proper keywords

Keywords are very important to SEO. You want to use the keywords in your content, headings and up in your metta tags. They have to be used properly though or you may get blacklisted and taken out of search results.

Backlinks

The more the merrier. If you have other sites linking back to you, then search engines look at this as a vote. These sites have to be relevant and reputable. If it’s a sketchy site then you could be deemed as sketchy.