SEO Blogger

I came across a great article on link building the other day and thought I’d share it with the virtual world, and in the process give the author a backlink… so make that 101 link building strategies – write a great article that everyone links to. Anyway! Here’s the start, and if it whets your appetite, click the read more link at the end of the snippet.

There are an unlimited number of ways to obtain high-quality backlinks. You’ve probably heard about many of them, including social bookmarking, linkbait, guest posting, directory submissions, press releases, etc. etc. etc…

Thankfully, we won’t be talking about those regurgitated strategies today. Instead, I have compiled over 100 out-of-the-box strategies to increase your link popularity and send tons of traffic your way.

This article contains all of my link building secrets, so I suggest you take some time to digest it. Grab some herbal tea (or Redbull) , whichever one works best for you, and don’t forget to bookmark the article for future reference.

The first juicy link building tactic is to create your own Ebay blog. Did you know you can
get backlinks directly from Ebay? That’s right. Ebay provides their members with their own personal blogs. Take a look at SEO superstar, Jim Boykin’s eBay blog. Notice the contextual links within the article which include his desired anchor text. If you check the source code, you will also find that these links are followed. You can create your own eBay blog and start building a few of your own high-powered links.

You can also build links with contests. Holding a blog contest is a great way to grow your blog’s audience, build inbound links, and improve your search engine presence. John Chow and John Cow have both used contests to rapidly increase his blog popularity.

You can promote your contest through the following sites…

Click here to read the full article at zanypixel.com

Now, I know this isn’t exactly the most advanced post in the world and is going back to basics quite a bit, but given the amount of basic questions I get asked on the subject I thought I’d jot down some points on it.

Everyone’s going on about XHTML nowadays, and you’re probably beginning to get a bit worried that your site must be infinitely inferior to the rest of the web as you’ve got no clue what XHTML is, and your site’s just coded in plain old HTML.

XHTML stands for Extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language and is a hybrid of XML and HTML. The basic principle behind it is that all pages designed in XHTML should look the same across all browsers and platforms, thanks to the way in which XHTML documents are parsed. I won’t try and bore you with an indepth explanation, but those nice people over at Wikipedia have an explanation that might make your head hurt. But if I were you, I’d just take my word for it that you should be coding in XHTML, and if you do so your sites should continue to look as you intended as the Internet continues to evolve. It’s all about trying to get a set of global standards that everyone follows so that no-one gets left behind… not too much anyway.

What is Semantic Code/HTML you ask?

Basically, it’s a way of writing your HTML in a more meaningful, structured and to be honest, sensible way. It’s all about using your header tags (H1, H2, etc) for yep, you guessed it – headers, instead of bolding the text and increasing the font size with the old <font size=”10000000000000000000″> tag. For paragraphs, use the <p> tag rather than sizing the font and adding hundreds of line breaks, for lists use the <li> tag, and so on.

If you want to add an image, you use the <img=…> tag because it’s the tag for inserting images, so it stands to reason really that when you’re adding a heading, list, etc, you use the correct tag, not some sort of bodge. Got it? Great.

Something I’ve often been asked is how to create a box with rounded corners in CSS, i.e. without using tables. Now, there are loads of tutorials out there waiting to be found, so I’m not going to write yet another one. What I am going to do is point you in the direction of a brilliant site that does the work for you.

As if being able to generate striped backgrounds in a matter of seconds weren’t enough, you can now save yourself the hassle in Photoshop by generating menu tabs with Tabs Generator!

Admittedly, this one doesn’t save you huge amounts of time if you already know what the tab you want to create looks like, but being able to experiment and play about a bit with minimal effort is great. There’s a lot of trial and error involved in web design, and anything that’ll help save me some time I’m all for.

I love the whole Web 2.0 concept. It’s so lazy and a dream come true for many a webmaster. It’s like you’re effectively out-sourcing the content creation for your site to as many internet users as you can possibly manage.

One of my Web 2.0 style sites has over 10,000 pages indexed in Google now after just 1 year, and I manually created about 5 of those. Not only that, but the beauty of the whole Web 2.0 concept is that as people are effectively creating the content for you, they want to share what they’ve done with others. Hey presto, looooooads of backlinks.

Some may consider it a weakness on my part, but I’m one of those web designers with some morals. I only raise this point after speaking to a friend the other night and learning the astronomical quote someone gave a company he knows for a really basic e-commerce style site.

It’s something that has always irritated about a lot of web design companies and freelancers out there – the complete shoddiness of their work coupled with the ridiculous amounts they charge, while they prey on unsuspecting small businesses who know very little about the web other than it’s getting bigger and they should probably have some sort of online presence. 9 times out of 10, once they’re online they’re unlikely to ever do much business directly from their site because of how small they are anyway, so an expensive all singing, all dancing site really isn’t the most cost-effective solution for them.

I don’t really know what to say… people are still tying themselves in knots over the latest Google Pagerank Update. People claiming they’re turning their back on Google because Google knocked them down a few PR notches for them trying to increase PR by spending a shed load of money on links – I mean it’s outrageous they do that! [/sarcasm] – I’d like to see these people actually turn their back on Google and give up all their traffic, somehow I doubt they’d do that though. But anyway! Back to my point.

I love it. Stripes are the new “cool” thing in web design, and they’re a pain in the arse to make in Photoshop. So why bother toiling for hours trying to get the perfect stripe when you can use…

As some of you may have been informed by Google, they’re starting testing on an AdSense referral program.

Here’s the blurb from Google regarding it:

You may already be using AdSense referrals to direct your users to Google products like Google Pack or Google AdWords. Now, you can expand the earning potential of your website even further by directing users to products and services from our base of AdWords advertisers.

In just a few minutes you can hand-pick and display ads that will appeal directly to your users’ tastes and interests. After choosing relevant ads or keywords, you will be able to customize referrals units that complement the look and feel of your site. Then you can start directing visitors to the products or services you’ve selected.

With referrals, you’ll be paid when your visitors click through to an advertiser’s site and complete an action defined by your advertisers, such as a sale or sign up. Because these actions are often more involved than a simple click or impression, advertisers pay more for these referrals, which can translate into higher earnings for your site. Further, you’ll see the expected earnings and advertiser performance ahead of time, so you can make the best decisions about what to refer. You can also choose to target the keywords that will ensure you get the highest-paying referrals for your ad space.

This feature is currently available on a limited basis as part of our beta test.

After being accepted into the program, I’m not really convinced I see the point of it. The products aren’t particularly appealing – not compared to affiliate networks – and you’ve got no flexibility on how you promote these products. The ads just look like regular Adsense, so aren’t likely to get a high CTR, and the image alternatives are quite limited.

I know Google are slowly taking over the world, but affiliate networks need not be worried here!