Posts Tagged ‘Link Building’

My Perfect WordPress Install – Will it Work?

Posted on the April 28th, 2011 under SEO Testing,SEO Tips,SEO Tools by Scott McLay

Over the last week I have been making some changes to by blog, these changes were made for three reasons – to decrease indexation times, increase crawler activity and hopefully increase rankings and traffic over time. Sadly I cannot publish any results because as usual I have managed to get a -30 Page penalty on a few keywords during a test which was not related to my new changes  (The Keyword spam which I tweeted about a few days ago – so instead of posting results I would like to go through the changes that I’ve made then do a follow-up post on the results.

Plug-ins Installed

Google XML Sitemap

Does exactly what you think it does, auto generates a new XML sitemap and pings search engines with the updated version.

Majestic SEO Dashboard Widget

This is a great plug-in from Dan Taylor that displays Majestic’s link growth graphs within your WordPress Dashboard, giving you a good idea of how your blog is growing over time without having to leave your website – this is something which will be important for me during testing the new setup ;)

nStatistics

If you want a plug-in which will display crawler activity on your blog then look no further, install this plug-in and get pretty graphs displaying both user and crawler activity over time

RSS Footer

I have been doing a bit of work with RSS directories recently and wanted a way to put static links at the bottom of every post in my RSS feed – job done

Feed2tweet

Just your every day auto Tweeter for your new posts.

Tweet old post

Ok so everyone has been wondering what plug-in Michael Grey has been using to display his archived posts, it’s just most people couldn’t be bothered to search for this obvious plug-in (says allot for the SEO community).

WP OnlyWire Auto Poster

Most SEO’s have an OnlyWire account for getting those bookmarks quickly – now you can auto post to OnlyWire via this plug-in every time you publish a blog post.

I’ve Done The Plug-ins Now The Fun Bit

As some people know I have been setting up quite a few profiles recently, most of which have ways to aggregate either your Twitter feed or your blog RSS feed, some of which will even accept your social bookmarking accounts (Example Here) and then give you an additional RSS feed output – which ten leads to some fun with RSS directories and so on.

With this in mind and the fact I’m auto posting links to OnlyWire (which sends out to quite a few places) you can imagine the 1000’s of links that could instantly be built to your new blog post as soon as you hit that publish button .

Now The Boring Bit

Now because I have just suggested a way to fully automate link building for a WordPress blog I thought I should put in a little disclaimer – In no way am I saying go out and do this, as most people know I test things with this blog and sometimes I will blog about these tests, I have not fully tested the above and would never use this technique for any clients. There are people who do this kind of thing already, out of which some make mistakes and get penalties, so be warned!

Link Building in 2011

Posted on the March 21st, 2011 under General SEO,Link Building,SEO Tips by Scott McLay

Quite a bit has changed since I my Link Building 101 was published on SEOmoz – most of which still applies to this year but I thought I would take the time to list what I feel will be the important / unimportant link types for 2011.

Social Media Links

Google has admitted that it values links from social media profiles such as Twitter and Facebook even though they are no-follow (unless you put one on your personal Facebook page) but what about other links coming from what we would call social media profiles?

Personally I feel that any link coming from pages containing social media components will be valued higher by Google and possibly other search engines – why wouldn’t they?

Verdict: Important

Site-Wide Links

Since around November / December site-wide links seem to have taken a massive hit, this may be because it is one of the easiest link types for Google to crack down on when looking into link spam – Lists of links containing “money” keywords rolled up one after the other must be easy to spot.

Verdict: Stay Away (or use branded keywords)

Guest Blog Posts

Guest posting is a great way to get links and always has been – provide a great post and that post will get links from Twitter profiles and other blogs to help power your link.

Verdict: Important

Contextual Ad’s

Contextual Ad’s seemed to pop up quite a bit last year (some disguised as Banner Ad’s) and seem to work well for now but I think these types of adverts will be the next link type to be discounted by Google (if they can).

Verdict: Potentially Dangerous

Blog / Forum Commenting

This link type is usually associated with spam, if you do this properly and post a great comment it is more likely to stick  and prompt replies from the community. These links are in no way powerful and will not help you rank on their own but they provide you with a good mix of natural anchors and nofollow links which can help build a solid base for other link types and create background noise around your website.

Verdict: Important

Directories

Directories have always been the bread and butter of link building – I’ve seen many posts over the last few months saying there is no point in these BUT people seem to forget about the hundreds of high quality directories out there – when submitting just keep an eye out for spam.

Verdict: Important

At the end of the day these are just my opinions on how important these link types will be to the search engines this year so it would be great if you could leave your thoughts too.