Domain power and quality search engine optimization could help your website to rank well on Google and other search engines with most content pages and large amount of keywords. New pages on quality websites can reach top positions almost instantly especially if it is a blog post or news page. For less powerfull websites it takes a time to get indexed and deserve at least some good spots with less popular key phrases.

  Sometimes you need to promote single page with product website sells, service you provide, or content you want people to read. Current positions could be lower than you expectations and additional promotion of this page / pages should be applied.

  It is harder to get deep backlinks, for example… directory owners like to approve only homepage. If you decide to exchange links, it is also hard to find partners who would like to provide deep link.

Social networks is the most popular place where webmasters promote their news pages and blog posts. 

Picture source: Dennis M. Smith blog.

  Promotion of news page or blog post.  

 Provide internal links from different pages of your site by telling that it is the most popular or the best post. Make sure that this link located on top, make some internal links from other pages in the middle of the content. Don’t place this link in the footer.

•  Submission of RSS feeds will make your new post to appear in news networks where search engine spiders can discover your link with post name as anchor text.
•  Use social sites to share this link. Many social networks don’t like when site owners submit their own pages, in this case you should ask your friend or regular reader to submit for you.
•  Use trackback services more by linking other blogs and news sites. Try to find friends in blogosphere who would love to link your articles.
•  You can use old type of promotion by submission in directories which approve deep links.
•  Article submission is another way to promote your single page.
•  Forums and discussion boards. If you submit your link by yourself it will look spammy, but you can always ask your friend who are regular poster in some forums. His / her reputation in specific message board could help to avoid removal or penalty from moderator.
•  Press releases is another way to find some backlinks for single page. 

 Promotion of single page with service you provide.

 If you provide some service it is good if you put this link on the every single page of your website. Internal links will point to Google that it is important page on a website. Try to use short url with keywords inside this url. Add this page as high as possible in your sitemap.

• Press releases is exactly about services companies provide or they are planning to provide.
• Contact people / companies who already your client. Ask if they can give feedback for yor service from their pages.
• Some social sites like LinkedIn allow business owners to link services your company offer.
• Use marketplaces and classfields. Even if submission cost money you can pay because Google doesn’t count marketplaces as link market.
• Article submission is a good way to promote single page with service you provide.
• The same way like with news pages you can use web directories which accept deep links.
• Local sites and portals which provide information about business is a good way to list your page with service.
• Try niche and business directories.

 Promotion of the page with product or item to sell.

 Many webmasters don’t like to link commercial websites (especially single page with specific product). Create good design and take professional pictures of this product. Use powerfull slogan, make it look more like product which could go viral.

•  Old promotional strategies like submission in deep directories, article submission, and niche networks might work.
•  Find social shopping sites where people share what they bought.
•  Find related websites and check their backlinks for deep pages. Type on Yahoo link:www.competitor-domain.com/product123 to find if someone link there. Submit your link in the same places where you find competitors.
•  Make bloggers to review your stuff. Offer them free product for good review. Don’t pay for reviews if you don’t want punishment from Google.
•  Ask your customers to give feedback from their websites.

  

1. DirectoryCritic - online database of web directories. Over 5000 directories sorted by Pagerank, date of submission, rating, niche etc. It is good to submit your business in all niche directories which related to your website.
2. Directory Owners - forum where you can find active directory owners and submit your site in their directories. It is the best way to avoid submissions in dead directories which never approve new requests.
3. Search Engine Colossus - collection of world search engines and directoires. Good place to build links on international websites.
4. PRWeb - service to submit press release and spread it around the world. Once your release is submitted it could appear on many other media sites. One submission could create viral success and hundereds backlinks.
5. Domain-Pop - backlink checker tool to find who link your competitors and get links in the same places.
6. TechWeb Media list of social networks - my own list of social sites.
7. Top 10 social media sites lists - SEO 2.0 blog provides list of sites where you can find social networks.
8. Big Boards - direcory of web forums. It is a good strategy to join forum communities and share your links in the signature and profile.
9. Link2Me - link exchange community. I suggest this one because Link2Me is free (paid for additional services). Exchange links only with related websites, unlimited receprocal links with unrelated and spammy websites could lead to punishment from Google and Yahoo. MSN can ban a website when they see many receprocal links.
10. SEOmoz MarketPlace - index of SEO and link building companies. If you have money but and aftaid to hire scammers… call us :) or use SEOmoz Marketplace.

 Spammy anchor text is a common thing in SEO industry, many webmasters don’t even realize that search engines can punish for some link building strategies. Wrong sources, old articles, poor SEO blogs can confuse people who are not familiar with SEO techniques trying to promote their sites. 

Example of Anchor Spam

————–

List of mistakes building anchor text:

• Building links with the same anchor is the fastest way to be punished by search engines. Webmasters without experience don’t realize that this strategy called “keyword spam” and #1 sign for Google that website are targeting top positions. To avoid “keyword spam” you should pick at least 5 different keywords to build backlinks. For example: Security supplies, emergency supplies, security products, affordable security supplies, emergency and disaster equipment.
• Asking webmaster who already gave link to change anchor text because you feel like you can rank better with different keywords. Once Google indexed backlink they don’t appreciate any changes in anchor, any additional changes lift “red flag” which shows that webmaster are trying to fix results.
• Long anchor text stuffed with keywords is nothing but punishment. It is fine when backlink contain long anchor text which represents title of the post or page. Anchor text like “Steve Jobs (Apple) introduced new iPod and iBook on February 10, 2008” is fine for search engines because it tells exactly what page is about. Anchor like “Apple, iPod, new iPod, Steve Jobs, iBook, Steve Jobs Apple, Apple iPod” is 100% spam which can destroy website rankings and bury domain trust.
• Grammar mistakes in anchor text… millions people was trying to do the same thing before and search engines filter links like this right away. You can lose domain trust, positions, and power of your backlinks right away.
• Building backlinks with anchor which doesn’t represent content on your site is the easiest way to get penalized. This strategy worked back in 1996; people who work for Google, Yahoo, and MSN had enough time to create algorithms which remove this type of spam.

  ThirtyDayChallenge videos on YouTube reached viral success and became a video guide about online marketing. Ed Dale and Dan Raine gave their project slogan “The TDC is about making your first $10 online”.  20 minute videos show full analysis and tutorial information about Google Trends, Bloglines, Technorati and other SEO / SEM related resources.

 Watch Traffic Proof Video

  I belive that I am a SEO expert which knows almost everything… now I want to confess that their videos really confused me because I did’t know or didn’t heard about many of this things before.  YouTube host over 400 videos from TDC and you can find them here.

  Your competitor could be the one who found all possible places to submit link and find related websites. By checking backlinks which point to related domains you can find good sites, networks, and niche directories. There is nothing wrong to check who link your competitors and it is the same like to open a regular magazine and look on which pages businesses which are similar to yours bought advertising space.

 Here some ways to find backlinks of your competitors:

1.  LinkVendor Domain Popularity. Free SEO tool which use Yahoo database to find indexed backlinks for domain. Tool organize links according Pagerank, IP, and domain name.
2.  Domain-Pop. Another SEO tool which shows backlinks by checking Google and Yahoo database. Pagerank information are temporary not avaliable and links in report are not clickable.
3.  IwebTool Backlink Checker. This tool gives backlink information instanty but all links in report disorganized. Also, it doesn’t show everything and sometimes it can miss really powerfull links from quality sites.
4.  Yahoo link: Command. By typing link:www.domain_name.com you can find backlinks which Yahoo keep in their database. Yahoo is the only search engine which doesn’t hide full backlink report from webmasters. It is better to make 100 results per page in preferences manu.
5.  Yahoo linkdomain: Command. The same way like link: you can type linkdomain: Command in Yahoo search box to pull information about backlinks. Linkdomain: and link: commands give differend information about domain.
6.  AllTheWeb link: Command. Since AllTheWeb belongs to Yahoo it also show backlinks but for some reason (most likely different datacenters) results are different from Yahoo.
7.   Google link: Command. Google still shows backlinks but they prefer to hide about 80% of information. You can get only information about some websites which link your competitors.
8.  Technorati. To find information about bloggers who link or reviewed your competitor you can type domain name in search box. Technorati gives information about blogs sorting them by date of review.
9.  Alexa website overview gives backlink information for old and popular websites which rank well according Alexa traffic information.

Promoting website about classical music we wrote over 600 letters to nonprofit music websites which belong to musicians, composers, music schools, enthusiasts, and libraries. Each website we picked contains some kind of directory or link page with related resources.

  We asked webmaster to provide a link for our client site who collected information about 2000+ composer and wrote over 20 000 pages of content over past 10 years.

  Result:
  40+ backlinks.
  1 angry email telling that we are spammers.
  70+ asked us for money or link back.

  Guy who has “made in 1994″ 3 page site asked $100 for a link. Too bad that so many people are greedy.

 Every experienced SEO expert will tell you that it is the best way to have one-way links from related websites. Established / popular websites receive natural backlinks all the time from different resources, sites, blogs. For new site it is hard to receive good backlinks and regular submissions could hurt business in the beginning when site owner add his link in too many directories or exchange links with too many sites (especially unrelated).

  Google gives a good recommendation on their webmaster guidelines page by telling:

“Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online”

Picture source: SEOmoz

  Contacting other webmasters for backlink could look little spammy. There are some good strategies to contact site owners turning yourself as friend and staying away from spam.

  Over 2 years ago we promoted classical music website called Everynote. We realized that there are millions people worldwide who loves classical music and many of them run their personal blogs and websites. We Google over 600 websites which belong to musicians, classical music fans, composers, teachers, and others. We send personal email to all of them asking for support by writing reviews. It wasn’t just similar letters, all site owners received personal email with information they might be interested or suggestions about their business. In less than a week we got over 40 responses with thank you letter and link back for our client. It was enough to get domain trust and extremely good Google rankings for targeted keywords.

Sitelinks on Google for Everynote. It tells that Google trust this domain.

 How to ask site owners:

•  Use contact forms and e-mail which site owner provide for public. Never use client / customer applications because people are really mad when they think about getting a new clent and see just another link request after they open email. Don’t use WHOIS to find email because most of them are outdated (active webmaster change email adress several time a year to get rid of spam).
•  Write regular mail - letters for those who givess home / office adress refusing to publish email.
•  Good thing if you find that webmaster is active on some social media site like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. In this case try to become a good friend who provides some good information.
•  Asking for link back explain why your site is important, tell about unique information you provide.
•  Benefit site owner with something. It is good if you give valuable advice or exelent feedback.
•  Send personal emails and messages trying to stay away from massive direct mail with the same request to everyone.
•  Offer support such as content writing or membership.
•  Don’t tell that you can give link back right away. Talk about link exchange only if site owner will reply with this offer.

 Spam and poor written emails reduce success and increase chance to appear in all spam databases.

    Recently I was working with my new client and we decided to check some information about his competitors. We took 10 random sites which related to his industry and checked their backlinks, website structure, promotional strategies. Through our simple analysis we found that 4 out of 10 competitors use different “black hat” SEO strategies. Link farms, link market, doorway pages, and spyware were used to promote 4 of this sites. My client was a nice guy and he asked me not to make any reports to Google. He told me: “It could happen with everyone and this website owners probably don’t even know what’s going on… most likely they just hired wrong people.”

I am 100% agree that most webmasters who pay someone to promote a website don’t even know about illegal techniques which might affect their business in the future. Here I would like to list some “black hat” SEO strategies you should know about:

•  Submission software. When someone offer to use submission software it means that they are going to spam blog comments, free directory owners, guest books, social network users, or to submit site in low quality directories with automatic approval. Software which can submit your links in related content pages on quality websites does not exist and technically impossible.
•  Adding links on their own websites. It means that company or person has hundreds websites (often subdomains and free accounts on networks like Blogger, LiveJournal, Narod.ru etc.) which created not for human eye. Simply, your site will appear in link farms.
• Cloaking. People who want to get good results for a short time with future removal from all major search engines can try this “service”.
• Link dealers. You might find it attractive when someone offers you to find websites with good traffic and Pagerank to buy links. In 2007 Google began campaign to find and punish link sellers and buyers. Violators are risking to lose Pagerank and drop in serps. Today any webmaster can submit complaint on Google about paid link.
• Submission in thousands search engines / directories. This service will take forever if someone will try to submit your site manually. Also, there are only several hundred quality directories which organized well and approve only quality websites. Submission is thousands directories is a scam or submission software. Also it might be a scheme to submit a website in link farms.
• Doorway pages. Some company or individual can collect clients and create doorway pages where sites link each other.
• Traffic from spyware. Your site will receive traffic from computers which infected with spyware / virus.
• Hidden links. Always check where your backlinks appear. If backlink checker tools show you that someone link your site but you can’t see this link it means that it might be hidden in .gif file, under background, cloaking etc.
• Keyword / anchor spam. Creating hundreds backlinks with the same anchor text to improve position for certain keyword called keyword spam. Google can remove your site from top positions for doing this. MSN even more strict about spamming keyword in anchor text.
• Buying old domains. “Black hat” SEO when company or individual are trying to buy old or expired domains to redirect them on your site.

Here what Google suggest if you became a victim of SEO scam:

 

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on “File a Complaint Online,” call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in another country, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.

Webmasters should use the nofollow attribute on many internal links.

If to think of a site like a waterfall, where the home page is the beginning, or the top, the pagerank should flow down into the most important pages. Website has a limited amount of pagerank, and the more links on a page, the more webmaster spread out pagerank.

 So any links that aren’t important, like links to comments, duplicated links on a page, archive links, category links, links with a # in them, should be nofollowed. If not,
 website waterfall will be reduced to a trickle, and the important pages will suffer. It’s ok to link to a category page once, but there’s no need to do it twice. Especially on the same page. (at the end of each post)

This article was written by Badi Jones - www.seologs.com

Earlier this month I wrote post where I criticized free web directories. Today I would like to explain how to find good directories with fast approval to submit link.

  Many directory owners opened their sites long time ago and do not approve any new submissions for a long time. Over 50% of free directories are “dead directories” without moderator. Owners keep them online to collect money from advertisers, Google AdSense, or to approve paid (featured) submissions only. PayPal account is the only way owners check submissions and approve sites.

  It is important to know if directory still alive and there are a real person who manage it. Going through list of directories you can submit your site in 200 of them (it often takes 3-5 hours) and only 20-40 of them will review your site without guarantee for approval.

 Most webmasters which launched directory recently work way harder to review a website and approve quality submissions. It is important for them to approve many quality websites, show other webmasters that directory has a lot of resources, and attract featured advertisers. That’s why submission in new directories gives a bigger chance for good approval rate.

 To find new directories you should use DirectoryCritic and when you see a list just click “sort by date”. It will give you a list with newest directories on top. Over there you can see Google Pagerank for each directory. Try to submit in all new directories with high Pagerank which mean that directory online for a long time and directory owner still work on promotion and moderation.

  Submission software as alternative?

 Directory submission software attract many webmasters who think that it is a good / fast way to submit a website. I will never recommend to use submission software because you never know where your links appear. Software can send your site in Google banned directories, sites which host bad sites (adult, illegal, spammy) links.