prasanth m's List: SEO

How can you get more visitors to your website? What can you do to stimulate traffic? Here's a checklist of 32 items you need to consider.

High rankings are the holy grail of search engine optimization. For certain, critical keyword phrases, nothing less than first place ranking will do.

# Anchor Text. Learn why anchor text is important and how you can influence it.
# Evaluating Link Quality. Understand what types of links search engineers want to count as votes.
# Web Directories. An easy source of links to help get new sites indexed. Also includes information about DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, and niche directories.

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Some SEOs rank pages and then waste that opportunity by creating a website that does not convert. Others try to push sites so hard that the push marketing leaves spammy footprints that make the site likely to be demoted by new search filters.

Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines can give you instant traffic and allow you to test new business models in real time. However, the pay-per-click market is competitive. It is worth spending an extensive period of time learning how to write and target ads, tracking your competitors, and doing deep keyword research before jumping in.

As the line between ads and content blur, web users will get better at tuning out ads. For longterm sustainability you are best of putting yourself as high on the value chain as you can. For most influential publishers that will mean selling ads direct or creating your own product, instead of relying on a third party network.

Links, Links and More Links! Successful Blogging is all about creating links and getting linked to.


A link is a connection from one Web resource to another. It consists of a "source" anchor and points to the "destination" anchor, which may be any Web resource (e.g., an image, a video
clip, a sound bite, a program, an HTML document, an element within an HTML document, etc.).

I've been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume's tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we're a bit overwhelmed). It's been a great learning experience and I've gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I'd take some time tonight to cover a few of the worst offenders:

In search engine optimization, “off page” factors have become more and more important as they relate to rankings. In particular, solid link popularity can literally make or break a site with the search engines.

Before we go any further, what is “link popularity”? In very simplistic terms, link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. These other sites consider your site important enough to link to. So, in the engine’s view, your site is considered important as well. What is meant by “link popularity” can get much more complex, which is discussed further in this article.

This is one of my favourite quotes from the great baseball coach, Yogi Berra.

Like most memorable quotes, it’s incredibly simple, and the wit in the statement makes us stop and think.

So what can we learn about our competitors' linking strategies just by watching? A lot as it turns out - we’ve just got to know what to watch.

How can I get external links to the internal pages of my site?

Can you suggest some strategies?

I am about to sign up for Ezinearticles.com (I love to write & we have a great newsletter program with tons of articles that our subscribers read regularly) and it looks like this is one route.

Finding quality sites to target is at the heart of any effective linking strategy. ‘Quality sites’ are not the ones that are easiest to get links from but those that will drive most relevant traffic to your site. In our last newsletter, we looked at how to maximize your link value to make your site more attractive to link targets. In this issue we’ll explore how to find quality link targets.

I’ve been experimenting with StumbleUpon for the past few months and have had several pleasant experiences. It’s simply an incredible viral means to drive a large amount of sustained traffic to any website over a period of time.

I wrote this mini guide on StumbleUpon because I thought StumbleUpon had enormous potential in maximizing brand exposure while fitting nicely with a long term site building strategy.

Over the past few years, I have consulted to a few dozen pretty popular startups and passed on many others. The overwhelming reason why I did not take on the majority as clients is a rather unfortunate truth in nearly every startup’s business plan…there is no audience building strategy.

Here’s a tip for how to get people to link to your blog.

Write lists!

I’ve been reminded by this again today by seeing just how many people are linking up to Piaras Kelly’s list of Tips on writing content for your blog. I must have seen 10 or 15 people link to it in the last few hours (including me). Even though I don’t agree with all of it there is something about a list that bloggers and blog readers love. Here’s a list of reasons why lists can be good for your blog: