• 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.

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

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!

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.

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

PageRank, Trust Rank, Inbound Link Quality:

• How will you acquire Page Rank?
• What is trust rank? How will you acquire trust rank?
• Can you figure out the PR totals of all the pages linking to you?
• Can you figure out the total traffic (Alexa rank) of the sites linking to you?
• What kind of sites are linking to you?
• Search Operator: Link:site.com -site.com

Different Domain Links:

• Incoming links from different domains?
• How many links do you have in MSN, Yahoo & Google?
• How many different types of domains?

Links from differing class C IP address:

• Make sure own websites linking are on a different server.

Percentage of deep links:

• How to check how many links are pointing to other pages on your site.
• Any software recommendation for this one would be awesome. Site Explorer & Web CEO can only do so much.

Directory Submit:

• Submit to directories before submitting to search engines. So site has relevance before getting crawled by spiders.
• Submit to search engines. Not recommended by SEO’s but recommended by the Search Engines. Your choice.
• Yahoo!Directory & DMOZ are as always a must!

Blogs, Wordpress & BlogSpot Links:

• Find Blogspots with high PR’s.
• Find Wordpress blogs with high PR’s.
• Get on Blogrolls - Whose Blog?
• Get mentioned by blog with high amount of RSS readers.
• Links from blogs with similar titles and content.
• Blog Commenting, MyBlogLog Following

Sitemaps:

• Can be a content rich page with keyword-rich links pointing to rightful pages within own site.

Webring:

• Linking with other sites in community/industry.
• Usually large link exchange or require banner on site.

Link Exchange:

• Create link exchange page and find links… email. Still works!
• Something like linkmetro.com InfoWizards FreeRelevantLinks.com  rankready.com Linkmarket.com. Good way to find willing link exchangers and to start link building.
• Check to make sure links are reciprocated. SEO Tools
• Create a “link to us page” and if possible an automated script to allow fast link building.
• Sending trackbacks (for blogs)

Ways to Find Links:

• url:keyword “add url” “keyword”, related:www.

Relevant Links:

• Placing your link on pages with matching page titles and proper title and description usage.

PDF eBook Directory:

• Submit pdf to ebook directories and give to people for PR, branding and linking building.

Anchor Text Tunneling:

• Create page with link partners info with a link pointing to his site. & Vise Versa.
• Link tunneling through giant sites.

Article directories:

• Write keyword-rich article with keyword-rich link pointing back to site and submit to all article directories. (Especially EzineArticles).
• Submit to Yahoo News (Must have amazing Press Release).

Signature Links:

• Join Forums and comment good and valuable information with sig-link back to site. If you have a blog, you could answer the question on it and mention it in the forum using your back link as a reference.
• Link in Email Signatures for bookmark/other stats.

Wiki Links:

• Add links to wikis and other education and dictionary sites.

Deep Linking:

• Make sure every page has at least 1 Google indexed inlink and try to build page rank from bottom up.
• Deep, deep linking (inbound and internally)

Surrounding Content:

• Check the title tags, META’s and surrounding text of links pointing to site. The more relevant, the better.

Local Links & Local Business Listings:

• Links from other websites registered in the same area code, zip code, city, county, state, etc.
• Local Business Listings List

30 Minute Backlinks:

• Create Software, submit software to software directories with links to your site.
• 30 Minute Backlinks Review

Web 2.0 Tagging:

• Every tag creates a page with a link back to page tagged. (Internal)

LINKS:

• Are any links buried too deeply in your site, not linked to from a primary page?
• All pages/links must be at most 3 pages away from home page.

Enter Site to Win Awards:

• momsnetwork.com/aemporium.shtml awardsites.com websiteawards.xe.net projectcool.com/sightings netguide.com coolsiteoftheday.com http://www.incrediblyuseful.com/

Banner & Logo Links:

• Create a banner or submit your logo to directories in exchange for links.
• Or purchase placement. clicksor, banner exchanges, blogs, Adbrite, etc.

Templates css galleries:

• Create a CSS stylesheet or wordpress theme. Author it your company and submit it to directories.

Query Topic Links:

• Anchor text links with query (targeted) words from sites about query topic.

Target smaller sites willing to link to you for content in the early stages. They are easier to get links from. But aim for big authority sites and NO linking to weak sites.

.edu, .gov, and city services are the best links…

I’m in the process of creating a link building manual/checklist that I plan to release at turn of the year. So far it’s 49 pages long and I’m not even halfway. I’m pretty sure I am going to sell it through Clickbank. But, it’d be free for all my subscribers, twitter followers and friend feeders.

List provided by SEO Link Building Specialist

Here are several examples of title tags ranking #1 & #2 for really tough terms.

#1 & 2 for “Mesothelioma Attorney“

#1 & 2 for “Search Engine Marketing“

#1 & 2 for “San Diego Hotels“

#1 & 2 for “Mortgage Loan Broker“

JameSEO Conclusion:

• Too many other ranking factors to predict how a title tag should be used.
• Google doesn’t display words after ~65-70 characters. (This doesn’t mean whole tag isn’t examined.)
• The only thing all top ranking sites’ title tags have in common is the presence of the keyword phrase and that the keyword phrases are bolded.
• Plurals and singulars have some type of relationship.
• Density of keyword counts.

The only right way to write a title tag is to describe the page correctly and honestly. Here are some SEO questions to ask yourself when creating proper title tags.

• Does it match keywords in META?
• Does it correlate with the description?
• Does it match the keywords in headings (H1, H2,..)?
• Does it go with page file name and URL (Page Title ~ page-title.php)?
• Does it describe the body content?
• Is the company/website name located in the title tag? If so, where?
• How prominent is the key phrase in the title tag (1st phrase in title or cut off at the end)?
• What’s the density of the targeted keyword? (total keywords divided by total words)
• How many characters are in the title tag?
• How many words are in title tag?
• Is the title eye-catchy? Does it stick out amongst the competition?
• Exact, phrase and broad match of keyword in title.
• Is the title tag unique from the other titles of your site? Are there duplicates?

All these questions should be asked comparatively speaking of your competition.

Hope this helps anyone learning how to write title tags.

Every blog post has its own page and every page has its own source code. If you check the source code of any given post, you’ll notice that comments on your posts count as content toward your site too. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on the types and amount of comments your blog gets. If your site is quality and worthy then people will leave comments containing content.

With so many blogs ranking on the SERP’s how can Google tell which blogs actually fulfills the point of a blog (interaction with users) and which ones will actually deliver a pleasant user experience(or at least content that keeps them coming back)? Which sites get routine posts and routine comments? Since we must consider the fact that commentators share content, it’s fair to assume getting lots of comments matching your posts can help increase your rankings due to extra relevant content backing the topic you are posting about.

Now how can I make sure my posts’ comments are comments that will help my site?

• Context of Comments: Are the comments describing what you are talking about? Are there any comments containing variations of your title or the keywords you are targeting?
• Length of Comments: If the comments are relating to the post, then the more sentences of content, the merrier. If someone wants to post a comment that’s the length of your post, cool. If 20 commentators leave 2 paragraph comments relating to your content, then your blog is doing great. It looks good to visitors for them to see interaction and you have a better chance of picking up more keyword real estate on the SERP’s.
• Amount of Comments/Links: The amount of comments should NOT be limited. BUT, the amount of links should be, because having a hundred or more links on your pages could trigger link farm flags. So the amount of commentators posting a link SHOULD BE LIMITED. It’s just safe to set your option to close at 100 comments. Sometimes a commentator creates a link and some don’t. But also take into account how many other external links you already have on your blogrolls and within that post. Then decide your comment max.

How many comments are there per post? How consistent are your comments? Does your blog consistently get 10 or more comments per post no matter what you write about? These are trust triggering questions, no?

Comments are also good because they refresh your page with new content. A lively page is a good page. Just look at the definition of “relevance”; Pertinence to the matter at hand.

Before I do and without getting into it, let’s just mention the obvious; keyword stuffed content, rearranged content, ungrammatical content and content made to barely pass Copyscape is soon to no longer work. Just think about it. A visitor comes to your site and either can’t read or understand what you are talking about. Why should that person spend time on your site? Why should he or she return? Was your site a waste of time? Bots can figure this out by examining how long that visitor is on all of the other sites ranking with you for similar queries and how many more sites (after yours) did that visitor have to surf before they found what they are looking for.

So if you aren’t satisfying the need behind the visitor’s query, another site will, thus becoming more relevant. That other site will get the bookmark. That other site will get a better ranking. Consider writing content visitors will bookmark, Digg, Stumble, or reference when discussing something similar. This will give you relevant back links that will last and not be degraded by constant upgrading search engine algorithms.

So, there’s my quick opinion on why content is king.

Let me explain to you exactly what I did:

Referencing my San Diego SEO Business Profile on Google & my San Diego SEO Web page on SEO by the Hour.

One Page Optimization

• Title Tag: San Diego SEO: SEO Specialist in San Diego, California

• META Description: Freelance SEO San Diego - James Harrison; a San Diego SEO Specialist has been providing excellent customer service and superior SEO services to many local San Diego companies. Contact SEO by the Hour today for a free SEO quote. - San Diego SEO Specialist -

• META Keywords: seo in san diego, san diego seo, southern california, san diego ca, 92109, seo specialist, seo, james harrison, sunny san diego

• Headings: <H1>San Diego SEO Specialist</h1> <h1>Call SEO by the Hour Today!</h1> <h1>Where in San Diego Am I located?</h1>

• Under the 1st H1 I mention San Diego in bold in the 1st sentence (prominence). I also mention San Diego in the 2, 4 and 5th sentence also with the last San Diego bolded. I also tried to add content that supported San Diego like ‘Sea World’, ‘California’, ‘beach’, etc.

• Under the 2nd H1 I made sure San Diego was in my first sentence and I bolded SEO (because SEO was in the 2nd H1 tag. Get it? SEO heading San Diego SEO content). I also mentioned 2 phone numbers, both with San Diego area codes. I made sure these numbers matched my business profile.

• Under the 3rd H1 I mentioned San Diego and surrounding areas just above a map from my local business profile.

• ***Notice how I keep bolding phrases that relate to the H1’s. Also note that the map is a Google map ;)

• Under the last H1 titled “Where in San Diego Am I Located“, I have a link pointing to my SEO business profile, a “where” link pointing to my business profile map and an internal link to another SEO page with “SEO” in the anchor text.

• In the Footer I added my address and made sure the zip code was listed.

Off Page Optimization

• I linked to it from my San Diego SEO blog. The link’s anchor text was “SEO Specialist located in San Diego, CA.” The title of that post is “SEO Specialist“. The URL is http://blogoptimizer.blogspot.com/2008/09/seo-specialist.html
• I linked to it from the home page of SEO by the Hour with a link titled “San Diego SEO“. Simple, right?
• The domain has several SEO and San Diego SEO related links pointing it and some of those pages have ’san diego’ in the title tag.
• You can visit my SEO Business profile on Google to see how I optimized it.

So, there you go. If you are a business with an actual company location, build a page strictly for local biz and start getting biz through Google fast!

I’ve done this for several websites, but I never done it this fast, it was pretty awesome though, to see positive results so quickly.