• Part I: Guest posting and theme distribution
• Part II: Crowdsourcing (running a contest) and directory submissions
• Part III: Social bookmarking and forum posting

This article will show you a few insights on how to use Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a popular service where people ask questions (and get answers) on various topics. Once you have answered a few questions and got a certain point threshold, your account is allowed to post “live” links, which is what you will be looking for.

• Difficulty: hard. If it’s not your area of expertise, you may have a hard time researching the topic and providing quality replies that will actually help people rather than solely promote your link.
• Time: Quite a lot. It takes time to reach Level 2 where you can post clickable links, otherwise your answers won’t carry any SEO benefit.
• Quality: High. All search engines regard Yahoo Answers as a high authority site, so a link from there can make a big impact.

Be reminded that it’s against Yahoo’s terms of service to reply to your own questions using multiple accounts. It is considered spam and your accounts will be blocked. Yahoo takes spamming very seriously and there are lots of reports where genuine accounts are flagged, which is one of the reasons you shouldn’t be spending all of your time building links with Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers is also known as a good way of providing decent amounts of traffic. The pages where your links are posted get consistent organic traffic, so if your answer is chosen as the most relevant one, whoever searched for that question will likely be visiting your link.

Offline networking

Face to face meet-ups can help you build up your backlinks profile. Trade conferences can be a great way of networking with people in your industry and acquiring one-way links.

• Difficulty: hard. You will have to get out of the office, which can be quite scary!  Jokes aside, networking with other people in your area of expertise isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Inter-personal skills should prevail here.
• Time consumed: A lot. You may need to work  for weeks or more to get under someone’s skin enough to have them write an article on your product or service.
• Quality: A+. These are the kind of links you should be looking for. Relevant, contextual links that look natural.

Always aim at one-way links when networking with people offline. After all, you will be putting in a lot of time (you can probably build hundreds of social bookmarks in the time it takes you to attend a conference), so don’t settle for anything less. Reciprocal links are a dime a dozen, you should be getting something better.

• Part I: Guest posting and theme distribution
• Part II: Crowdsourcing (running a contest) and directory submissions

In this article I will discuss the pros and cons of social bookmarking and forum posting as means of obtaining inbound links.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking used to work like a charm back in 2008 when you would have got an instant and major boost in SERPs only from a handful of submissions to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon or Reddit. However, with the increased popularity of open sourced scripts like Pligg, Scuttle or Drigg, everyone can build a social bookmarking profile these days, so their usefulness has faded somewhat. Social bookmarking is still a great way of getting fairly strong backlinks, as well as some targeted traffic.

• Difficulty: easy to medium. Submitting to the popular social bookmarking sites isn’t rocket science – you have to sign up, confirm your email address, plug in your site details and hit submit. However, once you decide to scale up your link building campaign, you will find that getting a larger list of quality sites isn’t as easy as it seems.
• Time consumed: Little if you only plan on submitting to a handful of sites, but can get quite time consuming once you scale up.
• Quality: medium to high. If your site is interesting and worth spreading around, a lot of people will link to it and the viral effect will kick in. If your story gets enough votes and you get on the front page of popular social bookmarking sites you can expect more traffic than your server can handle (unless your hosted with us!).

To have a better chance at getting your link spidered fast, use a custom tag on low popularity social bookmarking sites (something like your company name). If you submit a handful of quality stories, there is a chance that your tag may get featured on the front page, so all your links will be one link away from the site’s index.

Forum posting

A lot of forums allow you to post clickable links in your signature. This method can be extremely tiresome, since you would actually need to get involved in the community and post insightful messages. Don’t do it unless you really enjoy being a member in that forum.

• Difficulty: hard. Once you join a new forum, you will need to spend some time to learn what the community is about, what their standards are and how the posting etiquette works.
• Time consumed: a lot.
• Quality: low. For every post you make, you will get a link that is going to be on a page with lots of outbound links (assuming all other forum members have links in their signature), so the juice passed to your page can get quite insignificant.

As a final piece of advice: if you consider outsourcing your forum posting tasks, keep in mind that once the job is done and you have paid your freelancer he or she might change the signature to point to another client’s site. That’s one of the reasons why Google doesn’t think very high of forum links: they are not permanent, and they are artificial. Google usually looks for links that you did not initiate yourself directly above others.

This concludes our third part. Stay tuned for more tips.

What it may strike at a first glance is that SEO involves long-term planning whereas PPC is all about exploiting the moment and delivering cheaper clicks for higher return leads. SEO-ers spend lengthy hours analyzing long tail keywords and building insanely complicated linkwheels for a 20% return of investment, but build a strong link profile that may last for years. PPC marketers can get ROIs as high as 2000% off one campaign, but when their funding stops so do their profits.

The ‘right’ method is a compromise, as it often is. SEO gurus rely on (one) major search engine’s algorithms to pull in organic traffic. Should Google decide overnight that, let’s say, inbound links will no longer count and that whoever has the highest number of Twitter followers will rank first,  where would a majority of them be standing? Their organic traffic would plummet, and so would their earnings. Such a drastic change is unlikely to happen, but keep in mind that it’s only one company pulling the strings and all eggs are in the same basket.

PPC marketers, on the other hand, have a plethora of traffic platforms to choose from, so their risks are spread evenly. If Adwords and Facebook  close down overnight, a good PPC marketer would still have lots of services to choose from. And when their funding is drained they can always start back from scratch (you can even get a credit line if that’s what it takes).

You should also remember that SEO is a continuous process – you can’t simply assume that if you ranked #1 for your keyword you will stay there forever. Others are building links and will try to catch up, so you have to keep up the work.

The general truth you should keep in mind is that PPC is like billboard and TV advertising: it works immediately, it creates some buzz, raises some awareness and that’s it, if you don’t back it up by another media campaign. SEO, on the other hand, can equal sustainability and long-term growth if done correctly (of course, provided that Google, Yahoo and Bing don’t change their ranking algorithm drastically like in the above example).

PPC may be perfect for launching a new service, building up your social media fan base or getting more email subscribers. SEO, on the other hand, is what you should use for long-term development. Analyze them both, try to learn as much as you can and apply whichever technique fits in your particular scenario.

There are several tools out there that will help you analyze competitors’ backlinks. I briefly mentioned some of them in the second part of the SEO for newbies tutorial, I will elaborate a bit on them and mention a few more. I will further assume you run an auto repair shop in Hamilton, Ontario and you are competing for the keyphrase car repair services Hamilton.

The first result that pops in the query on Google.CA is this:

Depending on your geographical location, you might get different results, as I explained in the article on local factors that influence search engine ranking placements. Let’s see how you can find out who is linking to Paul’s Automotive Service.

Yahoo Site Explorer

YSE is a free service offered by Yahoo! and you will only need a Yahoo account to use it. Point your browser to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. Log in if required. Paste the competitor’s URL in the topmost bar and hit “Explore URL”:

On the “Inlinks” tab select Show Inlinks: except from this domain and to: entire site. And here you go, you have the competitor’s (most relevant) inbound links.

SEO Panel

You will need to download the script from seopanel.in and set it up on your hosting account (drop us a note if you need to host the script and we will help you out). I won’t get into details, the installation is quite straightforward and described on the developer’s website. SEO Panel won’t show the individual links but provide you with total numbers, so you can have a rough estimate on where you’re standing.

Log in, go to Admin Panel then click Website Manager on the left menu. Choose New Website. Fill in the name (an identification you can later refer this site by) and the URL. The other fields are optional and you can click “Crawl Meta Data” to get them filled in automatically.

Once you have saved the new site, get back to the Seo Tools tab and click Keywords manager. Choose New Keyword. Fill in the details and hit Proceed. The free version of SEO Panel only supports Google.com, but if you find the tool useful you can donate $10 or so and receive support for other Google sites.

Next, go to Backlinks Checker and select your website. Hit Proceed, then go to Backlinks Reports. You should get something in the line of this:

The second part of this article will discuss SEO Spyglass together with a few other tricks on how to track your competitors’ backlinks.

Before we get started, we are talking about your site not being indexed at all (i.e. the query “site:yoursite.com” in Google yields no results) as opposed to not ranking for your designated keywords. Ranking depends on a whole lot of factors and there might be certain keywords where you hardly have a shot at being in the top 10 results in your lifetime.

Misconfigured robots.txt

Some popular CMS’es have a Disallow: * directive in the robots.txt when you first install them, and you will have to switch it off manually. Having a bare-bone site or default installation show up in Google results is equated by some with being caught with your pants down – it’s not wise to allow spiders to crawl your site until you are ready to launch it to the public. Make sure your robots.txt allows crawlers in – this is one of the most common reasons why no spider visits your page.

Banned domain

If you have purchased the domain from an online marketplace (“a man in a white van”) as opposed to having registered it yourself, it could be that the domain has been previously banned by Google. Since the ownership has changed, you can have the name cleared out. Log in to Google Webmasters Tool, authenticate your site and follow the steps to request a reconsideration.

You just need to wait a bit longer

Depending on the amount of incoming links you have built, it can take spiders up to a week to visit your site for the first time. Don’t freak out if your site didn’t get indexed within the first 12 hours. You may start panicking if you don’t see any results in two weeks or more.

Way too many pages

Putting up way too many pages from the very beginning can lead spiders into believing you are a spammer. And it makes sense if you think about it, who builds a site with a million pages and launches it all of a sudden? Pages should be built gradually, more than a few thousand of them overnight is probably too much.

Flash or Javascript links

Even though Google is known to be able to crawl Flash links, don’t rely on it. Make sure you provide a text-only version of your site – at least while it’s still brand new and you need spiders to get a good grasp on what it’s about. Same goes for Javascript-only links, as well as Java or Silverlight plugins.

The above are probably the most common reasons why your website doesn’t get indexed within a reasonable time. Under normal circumstances it shouldn’t take more than a few days until you get at least the front page spidered so wait a little while before you start to worry.

Setup WordPress (many hosts, like us, offer a one click install), install some plugins and start adding content. While it’s not absolutely necessary to have magazine-style writing skills (after all, not everybody is a journalist), you do need to make sure your content is readable. If you aren’t a native English speaker you might want to outsource the writing tasks – you can find tons of people who can write insightful articles for as little as 1-2 dollars per hundred words. Make sure to apply all the on-page factors you have learned so far. Then move on to off-page SEO. We have an ongoing series of articles on good and bad link building methods, read part I here and part II here.

At this stage, you might want to invest a bit in a SERPs tracking tool. It’s not mandatory, your free version of SEO Spyglass can still be useful but it’s limitations may become annoying. Alternatively, you can have a look at SEO Panel. It’s open source, free, and you can install it on your hosting account.

Again, document each step. Keep a log of what you did every day,  it will help you analyze what went wrong and keep you from procrastinating. Work on your new site every day. Add 1-2 articles and build links on a daily basis.

You might run into programs that will automate your tasks. While I don’t necessarily condone such practices – particularly since most of them are on the edge of black hat marketing – here are some notes you should keep in mind:

• I would strongly advise against automating anything at this step. You are here to learn how the system works. Don’t use any tools where you click a button and everything gets done automagically. It’s like cheating all your way through college – you get a degree at the end but you can’t use it anywhere. No one will hire you because you don’t know anything.
• Not all automation tools are black hat. There is nothing wrong with using Roboform or writing your own Greasemonkey scripts to fill out registration forms at social bookmarking sites.
• A lot of tools, on the other hand, can do more harm than good if you use them recklessly – that is, you have no idea what you are doing. You can end up spamming certain keywords and devaluing a page you spent weeks building. There are many “horror stories” of webmasters who lost top positions for competitive keywords because they pushed the wrong buttons.
• Last but not least, these tools tend to cost a lot of money. If you aren’t pulling any revenue off your new site you shouldn’t spend thousands for tools you may have no use for.

That’s about it. SEO is not rocket science, anyone can rank for mildly competitive keywords with some work and dedication. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

As spammers’ techniques have evolved, so have the search engines algorithms. The first spam sites date back to around ten years ago when you could rank very high with a site bloated with ads and unrelated repeating phrases. As Google caught up with spammers more and more shady practices have become mainstream. A popular technique used by gray-hat marketers nowadays involves tools that grab a piece of content and “spin” it into hundreds of fairly unique articles by replacing each word with its synonyms. Each of these are then submitted to article directories, yielding hundreds of backlinks with little work.

Content that looks like it has been written by a monkey with a typewriter will probably get de-indexed in the near future, as Google recently announced on their blog. Such results may be shown if and only if the user has typed in a really long keyword and there are no other competitive results. Such articles are either created by a software program or by an illiterate (human) writer – either way they don’t bring any added value to a visitor who is looking for genuine information.

These tools, also known as “content spinners”, are a surefire way of raising some warning flags. Google is sure to ban you once the per-page “bogus” content ratio is above a certain threshold. Let’s have a look at what you might get when spinning a simple phrase like

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

A quick search for synonyms on a site like thesaurus.com gets us:

• quick: ASAP, a move on, accelerated, double time, move it, on the double, swift, agile, fast, speedy
• brown: dark, chestnut, coffee, dust, hazel, snuff-colored, toast
• fox: coyote, cur, dingo, pooch (this is the closest context, most of the results thesaurus.com gives are in the range of angel/babe/peach/attractive woman or bluff/cheat/con/deceive)
• jumps: leap, bob, canter, leaping, nosedive, upsurge, leapfrogging, hop (note how all verbs are in infinitive rather than present simple tense,  so your software will also have to take care of tenses)
• lazy: apathetic, asleep on the job, lifeless, procrastinating, idle
• dog: bitch (!), mongrel, bowwow, flea bag

You guessed it,  the results are going to be ridiculous:

The ASAP coffee dingo leapfrogging over the asleep on the job mongrel.

The double time dark coyote leap over the idle flea bag.

Content spinning is not the right choice of doing article marketing. The benefits over the short run won’t matter anymore when Google catches up with your practices and de-indexes all your pages.

First, read all you can on the topic. Try to understand the entire concept on paper – how a search engine works, how it crawls and ranks pages – before building a single link. Read and understand about key concepts such as metadata, keyword densities, link authority and on-page and off-page optimization. Once you have a fairly good grasp of the core concepts, move on.

Build a simple site around a niche with low competition. Try something like your last name (Of course if your last name is Smith or something very common, go for your full name). It’s alright to use a free service,  like a wordpress.com blog. As a side note, I would personally advise against using Blogspot as it’s a bit difficult to work with (It doesn’t offer some of the basic blogging features like trackbacks or comment moderation, not to mention you don’t get to use any of the great WordPress plugins out there).

Set up some trackers to measure metrics. Use Google Analytics for visitor stats and SEO Spyglass (the free version will do for starters) to track incoming links and search engine rankings. Set up simple conversion goals (try, for example, to get people to click to your Bio page) and measure them with Google Analytics.

Next, apply what you have learned in the first steps. Build a few incoming links and let them mature for a week or two, then record the results. You will want to document each step at this stage, as it will help you understand why you get the results and, most important, see what worked well and what didn’t.

Once you feel confident in your skills, it’s time to move to the “real world”. Find a niche you like, something you would enjoy researching and writing about every day. Unless you plan on outsourcing your writing, it’s very important that you enjoy what you are doing. I have seen a plethora of SEO startups who bailed out after a couple of weeks because they didn’t see any results. SEO is an ongoing process, and depending on the pace you are working at, it might take anything from weeks to years to see actual results.  If you are starting a blog for your company, be sure your blog is topically related to your business.

Get a domain and a good hosting platform, preferably from Lifeline design! If you’re creating a blog for your business, you can set it up on your existing domain under a directory called “blog” or something similar.

Read more on what to do with your new hosting account in Part II.

Running a contest

Holding a SEO contest can do magic in terms of link building if you do it right. You will need two key factors: consistent prizes (no one rushes in to win pennies) and publicity (if you’re offering the latest Macbook Pro, people have to know about it.)

• Difficulty: Easy to medium. Large contests can be quite a headache to organize and manage. People ask all sorts of questions, ranging from legitimate concerns to the “Hey is this for real?” kind, and you will have to answer each of them.
• Time consumed: Medium. Doing all the customer support, keeping in touch with sponsors and promoting the contest takes time.
• Quality: High, provided you are doing it right. As I said above, people won’t come if you don’t make it worth their while. Don’t offer banner advertisements on your site with 300 monthly unique visitors and expect to get huge response rates.

To improve your chances of success, try to offer consistent prizes. Hard cold cash or latest technology gadgets are always baits for the “big players” in any industry. 2011 will probably be the year of the tablets, so an iPad or a Samsung Galaxy Tab (or anything retailed at $500 or more) could get some well established bloggers in your contest.

Directory submissions

Submitting to directories used to be on top of the wave ten years ago when SEO was only about setting up the right meta tags and getting as many inbound links as humanly possible. Opinions vary on the quality of directory submissions these days—some say they are completely useless, while others believe that the quantity over quality approach (i.e. submitting to tens of thousands of sites) is far better than other link building methods. My take is that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and submitting to a handful of directories can still be of some help if you do it right.

• Difficulty: Easy. You must fill out a short form, which is not exactly rocket science.
• Time consumed: Little. You will only spend a couple of minutes for each submission, or much less if you have a semi-automated scheme (Roboform or any other script or program that can help you out with filling in forms faster.)
• Quality: Low to medium. There are still lots of quality directories out there that can pass considerable amounts of link juice to your page.

For better chances of getting it done properly, choose directories that have a proper category structure (i.e. no sites on Make Money Online schemes in the Automotives section,) as this will ensure the relevancy of your inbound link. Niche directories might also be of help.

In our third episode I will talk about social media bookmarking and forum posting as means of building inbound links.

Guest posting

A guest post is an article you write for someone else’s blog, in exchange for one or two editorial links and maybe even a resource box with your picture and a brief bio.

• Difficulty: Medium. You are going to write an insightful post on a topic you are already familiar with, so it shouldn’t be that difficult.
• Time: Medium. Words aren’t likely to simply start flowing on their own, so you will have to do some research. Again, since you are already familiar with the subject, it shouldn’t take you that much time as looking up information in a field that’s completely unknown to you.
• Quality: High. Guest posting is one of the most prolific link building methods, as it brings more than simply SEO value. A good article can also bring you traffic, RSS and mailing list subscribers as well as recognition from other bloggers in the field.

To improve your chances of success, make sure your blog is “prepared” for the new wave of visitors. Expect the unexpected, make sure your web server can handle a surge in traffic. You should also prepare a handful of great posts to be displayed on the front page (these will be the first articles your new visitors will read.) Give them reasons to return!

Theme distribution

Theme distribution is the process of distributing customized templates for WordPress, Joomla, PHP Nuke or other popular CMS’es. The catch is that you place a link to your service in the footer of the themes, so whoever installs it on his site gives you a link.

• Difficulty: Medium to HIgh. You will need the knowledge and skills to create a template, as well as a good eye for design. Alternatively, you could edit themes distributed under a permissive license and add your links.
• Time: Medium to High. Again, building a custom template from scratch or modifying an existing one can take you quite a lot of time and resources. Depending on how good the theme is and your experience with design, the whole process can take you between a few hours and a few days.
• Quality: Low. You might get some decent links from blogs announcing the release of your theme, but that’s about it. The templates will be installed on brand new sites with close to no authority. Also, Google has a proven record of devaluing footer links. And, to make things even worse, keep in mind that you can’t control the topic on the site where your theme will be installed, so you will be getting a lot of off-topic links.

To have a better chance of success with this method, your theme needs to be simply stunning, so that a lot of people will install it and get you a quantity-over-quality result. Otherwise you might as well drop the idea altogether.

This concludes our first episode on good and bad link building practices. In Part II, we will discuss two other methods—holding a contest and submitting to directories.