An SEO Blog by James Harrison

Before starting a link building campaign, record how many links you have according to Google, Yahoo! and any other backlink checker you can count on. Record how many links are pointing to your competitors as well. There are several reasons why you want to do this…

• Sets a benchmark; either to have more links than you had before by a certain time or to see if you can get more links than your competitors.
• You can gauge yourself compared to your competition. You can get an idea on how many links you really need to compete for various terms.
• If incorporating title tags (given by Yahoo! to export), you can see just how relevant the linking sites must be compared to your competition
• If incorporating other metrics like anchor text, you can see just how many links saying your targeted keyword, you’re going to need.
• If presenting to someone, you can show proof that link weight is what they need to even have a chance in the search engine popularity contest.
• If reporting to a client your link building service progression, you can show how many links (recognized) you’ve acquired over any given time.
• Main Reason - To see why you’re not #1

As I have stressed before anchor text is HUGE and topical relevance & strength of that page containing the anchor text determines how huge that anchor really is.

However, back to backlink counting…

Record all the URL’s pointing back to your site and its competitors. If you use a search engine like yahoo site explorer and search link:yourwebsite.com, you can see total backlink count and titles of the page linking to any website you check. If you’re using backlink tools like the backlinkwatch or webconf’s back link anchor text analysis tool you can see the anchor text of the links as well. If you can mix excel, yahoo & backlinkwatch together, you can find some really powerful link building data.

Why is this important?

It’s easier to track your efforts and understand why things work in an organized format in order to take the most efficient route to the top of the search engines for any given keyword.

I’m in the process of creating a free SEO backlink tool that will analyze backlinks and a few backlink attributes (title, PR, URL, etc) that will give you the ability to export to csv. But, that’s free time, experiment work that I’ve found myself to have less and less time doing.

Here’s a link building video given to some of my friends/clients to help them understand a back link benchmark report I use when I put on my link building expert service hat, and to give you as well a better idea of recording backlinks and their anchor texts.

Some SEO link building fun to consider

See how many links are pointing to your top 10 competitors. Then record the ages of your competitor’s domains. You can either see have many links they’ve acquired monthly on average by dividing total backlinks by total months online, or you can measure it exponentially.  Like month 1 they obtained 20, month 2 they obtained 30 or 40, month 3 they got 40 or 80. Using the right formulas will unlock just how fast you really can “naturally” build links.

Also, check out my most recent ezinearticle expert article: Link Building Tips for Obtaining Relevant Backlinks

Thanks again for reading my blog.

I know many of you SEO’s feel the same or experience the same thing…

You know more about SEO and computers than everyone around you, so you’re “Mr. SEO know it All” that has to answer every computer related question for friends, family, and co-workers, even if it has nothing to do with SEO. But every once in a while a buddy of mine will ask me a SEO question on IM and I take on the role of Mr. Know It All James-SEO.

[11:15] seobuddy: hey james…do you have a minute to look at a site for me?
[11:16] James-SEO: sure
[11:17] seobuddy: Here’s the site

[11:20] seobuddy: the site has rankings, but do you think it may be considered spam at the bottom of the pages?
[11:20] seobuddy: the keywords almost the same color as the background.
[11:20] seobuddy: what are you thoughts?
[11:21] James-SEO: you know, it’s not too bad, but it’s not good
[11:21] James-SEO: I have 2 things to say about this
[11:22] James-SEO: 1. Google can recognize the color difference and assume that since you don’t really want visitors to see those words that well, they can assign a lesser value to those words. why even index that content?
[11:23] James-SEO: after all, those aren’t the words you want to visitors to read
[11:23] James-SEO: since it’s not invisible, it’s not “illegal”
[11:24] James-SEO: But it’s also not in proper legible grammar, so it’s safe to assume that that part is not meant to be read
[11:24] James-SEO: it must be just a bunch of keywords with commas and a matching color background[11:24] [11:25]seobuddy: do they need to be there…isn’t having them in the meta’s good enough…
[11:25] James-SEO: meta data is different than onpage content
[11:26] James-SEO: if you insist on having those keywords there, make sure those exact keywords are in the metas for relevance between meta data and content
[11:26] James-SEO: if those keywords are in the meta data, each phrase better be found somewhere in the content
[11:26] James-SEO: naturally
[11:26] James-SEO: not slightly hidden
[11:26] seobuddy: i also have the same titles on most of my pages…
[11:27] James-SEO: that’s a big no no as well
[11:27] seobuddy: yea, you told me that before, that’s why I mentioned it
[11:27] James-SEO: Google likes each page to be unique
[11:28] James-SEO: if pages have a lot of similarities, they just index the stronger page
[11:28] James-SEO: but back to the almost hidden keywords,..
[11:28] James-SEO: #2
[11:28] James-SEO: the background is CSS, it has a background image and a background color
[11:29] James-SEO: google can only read (for now) the color of the background, which by default is normally white. so the words look to google light Grey on white
[11:29] James-SEO: If the css background is set to Grey, then it could appear you have completely hidden content
[11:29] James-SEO: light Grey content/keywords written in un readable form (like meta keywords) is of course of a lessor value than words in large bolder black font or bright red keywords mixed in content on white backgrounds
[11:29] seobuddy: yea, but i thought that bolding kw wasn’t nec anymore
[11:30] James-SEO: there’s 100’s of ranking factors, ALL of value
[11:30] James-SEO: bolding just doesn’t mean as much now as it did in 2000
[11:30] James-SEO: but search bots can still recognize a bolded phrase
[11:38] seobuddy: so if you were optimizing this site, what would you do to it? i am running a ranking report now, for a crapload of keywords, so it will take a long while. I do have many 1st page rankings, so what could you change?
[11:39] James-SEO: got to find out if the site is ranking for the most relevant traffic AND conversion generating terms
[11:41] James-SEO: i’d make sure 1st that all meta data is unique from page to page and that they are all targeting the BEST (tons of factors) keywords
[11:42] James-SEO: then make sure the content is naturally relevant to those metas
[11:42] James-SEO: or do it vice versa; content then metas
[11:43] seobuddy: yea, but I don’t have the text on some of the pages to support a lot of keywords, so would I be better off putting them at the bottom of the page, only in bold?
[11:44] James-SEO: nothing compares to naturally written content. Why do you feel you should rank for terms your content isn’t relevant to?
[11:44] James-SEO: that sounds dishonest and misleading

Anyone that has been writing papers in Word doc over the years may have noticed some changes in Microsoft Word since Windows and Office 95/98. Actually, Word has upgraded tremendously since. 1 upgrade I want to talk about today is the grammar check. You can tell that Windows is more sophisticated in recognizing errors (spelling and grammar) now.

If Word can recognize sentence structure and point out verbs, nouns and fragments, then no telling what Google could recognize. Obviously Google wants to deliver relevant sites to users, but it has been stressed that quality plays just as much of a role. And believe you me, besides design; the only way to really tell if your site is quality is through your content. With Google being the ultra-website analyzer, they have to look at things in a way a human would look at it.

What I’m trying to say…

Quality content is good for users to understand what you are saying/selling. Plus error-free pages are recommended by Google/Yahoo/MSN and the general public.

&

If Word can give you a green squiggly line for grammar mistakes, Google can recognize and assign worth to each individual person, place, thing, action, adjective and so on within a sentence, (especially keywords you’re ranking for or have links containing).

For instance; in the 1st sentence below “SEO” is a noun or action and in the second sentence “SEO” is an adjective.

I do SEO for a local internet marketing firm.

I am an SEO Specialist at an internet marketing company.

Why does this matter? Well to be quite honest, I’m not sure if it does. But as an SEO specialist, when studying a site’s top ranking competitors; I would see how they utilize or present a keyword. For example, if you look at the rankings for “seo” you’ll see that most of the sites are using “seo” as a noun (or action). But if you search “seo specialist” you’ll see all the sites are specialist sites pertaining to SEO.

There’s a difference. Nouns are harder to rank for because you usually need strong adjective pages supporting the noun page (if that make sense)

So what, James…

If you want to rank for “link building” use link building as a noun or as a verb (or even better a proper noun) instead of an adjective or adverb. The most important parts of a sentence are the nouns and the actions/verbs. Focus on making your keywords one of them. UNLESS you want to rank for link building expert; then you’d make sure expert is what the page and content is about, but have link building being the describer of the type of expert you are.

Just something to think about.

If you feel you wasted your time reading my random SEO thought, please let me know. If these random thoughts are of interest to you, I’ll continue to blurb whatever I’m thinking more often.

Oh yeah, thanks for reading my blog!

Since it has come to my attention that some of my followers still think I work at MEA Digital, I decided to post an update. I’m no longer an Online Media Specialist at MEA Digital. I quit back in December 2008. Since then I’ve been working as a link building specialist ;) at SEO by the Hour in San Diego, CA. I’ve been keeping busy with affiliate marketing and other website duties since the turn of the year.

Because I haven’t cared enough about this blog to make it a money maker, I’ve been neglecting it…

Every time I sign in, I see more and more comments I should respond to. I sometimes prefer just to go back to working on something else. But since I’m an SEO Specialist and this is my SEO blog, I might as well utilize (monetize) it.

So I’m letting all my readers know now; this blog back, but is selling out. I’m going to have banners, review sites, hold contests, update my wordpress and more. That’s the only way I’ll be able to set time aside to give you guys fresh SEO content, MORE OFTEN.

On the bright side, I’ll blog about everything I’m doing so you can follow along.

Don’t mind this post. I’m not a big fan of blogging about blog commenting. I just wanted to list the ways that I find blogs so that it can be easily accessible when doing a little link building (blog commenting).

But for my buddies that do read my blog, this is for you;…

Here are a list of ways to find blogs to comment on. This list mainly focuses on NoFollow blogs, but blogs that follow their comments are not the only blogs to comment on. Just because the link isn’t followed doesn’t make it worthless in the overall picture of link building. I myself prefer links that are followed, but links that generate traffic and that are recognized by Yahoo site explorer, or links that are on pages highly relevant to your site can be just as valuable.

ALSO, nofollow blog commenting can help PageRank but it shouldn’t be the only way you build links. The search engines need to see a variety of links pointing to your site. I look at it this way, what are the easiest ways to get links? Blog commenting, directory submitting and automated reciprocal linking. Don’t you think Google knows that?

I must admit, blog commenting is one of the top ways to jump start your link building and site promotion campaign though.

So here’s the list…

DoFollow Blog Directories

Here are directories that supposedly only contain blogs with no nofollow attributes. I like these types of blog lists because if you are taking a quick and strictly topical relevant linking approach, you can go straight to the blogs that are in the same category as your site.

http://www.blogsthatfollow.com/

http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/dofollow/

http://dofollowdir.com/

http://followlist.com/

http://www.dofollowblogs.com/index.php?c=0

DoFollow Blog Search Engines

This is a list of sites that have search engines (usually Google made) that only searches sites within their index and these sites are all “DoFollow” blogs.

http://www.commenthunt.com/

http://dofollow.thegermz.com/

http://www.creativecaravan.co.uk/dofollow-blog-search.asp

http://www.jyse.com/

http://w3ec.com/dofollow/

http://rishabhsood.net/do-follow-blog-search-engine/

http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/

http://dofollow.radpixels.com/

Popular Blog Search Engines

These search engines are great for finding blogs that are frequently crawled, popular or surrounded by buzz. NoFollows and No NoFollows.

http://technorati.com/search/

http://blog.google.com/

http://www.blogpulse.com/

http://www.bloglines.com/search

http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/JameSEO/

DoFollow Blog Lists

http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/

http://thenexus.tk/do-follow-blog-list/

http://www.whydowork.com/blog/blogging-tips/558/

http://nigelmcloughlin.com/do-follow-blogs

http://www.stephanmiller.com/the-ultimate-dofollow-blog-list/

Blog Search Operators

inurl:tag/keyword

inurl:tags/san+diego

intitle:San Diego inurl:tags

intitle:Hotels inurl:blog

intitle:blog inurl:tag OR new york