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Georgijevic Developer Team

Georgijevic Developer Team

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How to Score Guest Post Opportunities out the Wazoo

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guest_post

The last wave of Google changes has left everyone in the world of SEO with bewildered brains and sweaty palms. We’re trying to regroup, make sense of the madness, and scrambling to create another cohesive SEO strategy for our websites. But in the aftermath of all these algo updates (and promises of plenty more to come), is more SEO really the best strategy?

Another writer here at Site-Reference thinks maybe the answer is no, and she’s compiled a killer list of alternative marketing channels for your website. One of the methods she suggests is guest posting, which we’ve discussed here quite a bit. Guest posting is the single best way to beef up your backlink profile at this point. That’s probably why it seems like everyone is jumping on the bandwagon in an attempt to wrangle as many backlinks from high quality sites as possible.

The frenzy has left us with a sort of “market saturation” situation. Regardless of the niche, well-known bloggers and site owners are now dealing with inboxes full of guest post requests every day – and they’re starting to shut off. Some are even charging hefty fees for what they’re calling “sponsored posts”. Yes, this is a paid link situation, but that’s a conversation for another day.

Today, I want to focus on ways in which you can bypass responses of “no” to your guest post queries by building relationships with other bloggers in your niche. More than that, though, I want to reveal to you how to get leaders in your niche to come to you asking for guest post contributions.

I’ve talked about the power of community-building frequently over the past few months (check out my posts here,here, and here, for example), and for good reason. The practice will hand you the virtual keys to the kingdom if you’re serious about growing your site, and once you’ve become a force to be reckoned with in your niche, pitching guest post queries will quickly become a thing of the past.

Write Great Stuff

It doesn’t matter how much you schmooze with others in your niche, if your website doesn’t have killer content, there’s no real incentive for other webmasters to want you writing stuff for their sites. When you pitch a guest post query, the first thing the site owner will do is check out your website. If your content leaves something to be desired, you’re unlikely to receive further contact about the deal (unless it’s a paid post situation, in which case it can get pricy in a hurry).

Even worse, if your site is full of articles with terrible grammar, atrocious spelling, or even just plain lack of insight and creativity, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. Whatever’s on your website is what your peers will expect on theirs, so make sure your content is killer. Here’s a little help with that.

Network, Network, Network

When you’re working to build your website, creating a supportive community should be high on your list of priorities. Why? Well, once you’ve found the key players in your niche, you can leverage their traffic by way of guest posts without needing to email site owners cold.

Instead, comment on their posts. Make your presence known. Reach out by email, Twitter, or any other venue to establish and nurture a real relationship. Then, when it feels right, reach out and ask about guest posting on the site. Once you’ve been accepted into your community, you’ll be surprised how many people will say yes.

Promote Others Like Crazy

It’s the golden rule, and it works: you need to give in order to receive – selflessly. It’s vital to establish relationships with others in your niche, yes, but for optimal results, consider taking it one step further. After you’ve made connections, begin looking for ways to help your fellow webmasters with their own site promotion efforts. For example, try tweeting a handful of their posts each week. Create a “best of” piece with dofollow links to posts you enjoyed within your network.

Are you good at something – website design, SEO, plugin support? Seek out some small task you can perform for website owners and offer to help. You may have the chance to ask for a guest post as repayment. Think creatively and maintain a helpful mindset instead of an opportunistic one. This will allow you to come from a genuine place, and other webmasters will appreciate that. In fact, you’ll likely begin to see other websites linking to your content naturally in acts of reciprocity for all your kind deeds and support, so the need to guest post will eventually lessen as you network more and more.

Funny how that works, right?

As an aside this week, I’d like to point you to a new Google Webmaster Help video that was uploaded to YouTube on October 9. Ironically, the video tackled guest blogging for links. Here’s the stance taken by Matt Cutts, which I’ve summarized in my own words:

Guest blogging Is good (yay), but low-quality guest blogging is bad. Cutts specifically points to 200-300 word articles on low-quality websites. Keep your content rich and make sure you choose websites that are sporting some PageRank to host your guest posts. Remember Google judges backlinks based on the quality of the sites they come from, so make your choices count.

Google approves, everybody! That means an onslaught of new guest post seekers will be stalking the ‘net over the next few months – you can take that to the bank. Site owners will be guarding their space on the Web like jealous lovers, so community-building is now the primary strategy going forward if you want to get the backlinks that count.

So what are you waiting for? Start connecting!

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/how-to-score-guest-post-opportunities-out-the-wazoo/

10 SEO and Link Building Mistakes

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Mistake 1 – Neglecting On-page Optimization:

I think more people are beginning to understand the importance of on-page optimization when it comes to ranking their web pages. With so much focus on keywords and link building though, often I see webmasters focusing too heavily on the “off page” stuff, without realizing what they do “on” their website is just as important. Proper internal linking, keyword density, LSI, image text, no follow tags, just to name a few, are also very important to search engines. There are free plugins available to help you with a lot of this stuff, so do your due diligence and implement whatever strategies need be.

Mistake 2 – Freaking Out When Rankings Plummet:

Go onto any internet marketing forum and you will see this every single time. People are literally freaking out when they see their rankings drop. Most often this is due to a thing we call the Google dance. All new websites go through what is called a “honeymoon” period where their websites rank very well at the beginning, but after a couple of weeks they settle in the search results… usually at a much lower ranking, again, this is natural.

If your websites have age and have dropped in rankings, you may need to work harder to get your position back. You may need to update your content more often, you may need to build more backlinks or you may need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Google’s algorithm is changing frequently these days so it’s important to find out what they want, and go give it to them. The days of gaming the system through black-hat techniques is coming to an end.

Mistake 3 – Writing for the Search Engines:

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see being made day in and day out. Webmasters are writing terrible content that is keyword stuffed for the bots. While it is important to have a certain keyword structure within your content so that the search engines know what your content is about, it is very important that you write for the human visitor FIRST. Some say for every 100 words, you should have your keyword inserted once. So, if you have a 1000 word post, you will put your target keyword into the article 10 times. I think this is a good rule of thumb to follow.

Make sure that when you read your article out loud, that it sounds natural and not robotic like. Always remember, if inserting your keyword too often into your post takes away from the natural flow of the article itself… then do not do it. Google is clamping down really hard on over optimized websites. Always write with your target human visitor in mind.

Mistake 4 – Building Thousands of Low Quality Links:

I cannot believe this is still going on with all of the changes Google has made. There are still idiots out there blasting thousands of links to their money sites in the hope of climbing the serps. I was offered 10,000 free links the other day to my website and I told the person to take a run and jump. Those kinds of links are going to have an adverse affect on your ranking. It has to be bloody obvious that Google hates these kinds of links and, if your business is solely dependent on this kind of strategy, then you are playing the fools game. One solid PR5 backlink from a relevant site will be far more powerful than a million links from low quality, non-relevant crappy sites.

Mistake 5 – Not Being Aware of Nofollow and Dofollow:

When I first started out in this industry I had no idea about these two terms. I built a lot of links to one of my first websites and it was taking forever to gain traction in the serps. After a bit of investigating I found that almost all of my backlinks were placed on web pages that were nofollow. Needless to say, those links were just not as effective for rankings as the dofollow links I needed. I’m not saying that nofollow links don’t have their place. In fact, it’s important to have diversity in your linking structure, but most of your links must be dofollow to gain maximum benefit.

Mistake 6 – Expecting Quick Results:

I know when I first started online, I expected to make a lot of money fairly quickly. Boy was I brought back down to earth over the next 6 – 12 months. I almost threw in the towel on more than one occasion because it became very frustrating, trying to make this thing work for me. I built website after website, built a hell of a lot of backlinks, wrote hundreds of articles and participated in all the social media sites, but, it just wasn’t happening as quick as I was led to believe it would.

I realized later on that NOBODY makes money online quickly. They all have to put in the hard work. Your progress can be accelerated if you are willing to spend some cash and outsource a lot of the grunt work, but in my experience, expecting to make money very quickly online usually works against you in the long run. The failure rate is so high because people find this out the hard way.

Mistake 7 – Not Being Consistent:

If you are serious about making money online then you must be consistent every single day with your efforts. This can be the biggest stumbling block for many. It almost was for me. You can work very hard to get top search engine rankings for a particular keyword, but even after the fact, you still have to be consistent with your efforts, else your competitors will overtake you fairly quickly. Everything you do in regards to your online business has got to be consistent. You must put the work in everyday if you are to see the results you’re after. Go read Jeff Olsen’s “The Slight Edge” and practice what you learn.

Mistake 8 – Not Diversifying Your Link Building:

To make your link building look natural, it’s important to gain backlinks from many different sources. Backlinks from just article directories and no other places for example, do not look natural and can hurt your rankings. You need to get links from social media sites, article directories, blogs, blog comments, forums etc. Diversifying your link building looks natural and can put you ahead of your competitors in the search results. A naturally good website will get links from many places, not just one or two.

Mistake 9 – Not Getting High Page Rank Links:

Every day you are backlinking, you should be looking to place your links onto high PR websites. Google values links placed on higher PR websites exponentially higher than low PR websites. These links are obviously harder to get, but that is exactly the point. The harder it is to get a link, the more valuable that link is likely to be. This is why all these push button software programs that can get you thousands of links are crap. You will not come across a software program that gets you high quality backlinks with the push of a button. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or a moron.

Mistake 10 – Not Updating Your Content Often Enough:

Obviously the more high quality backlinks pointing to your content, the higher your search engine rankings will be. You will then get lots of free traffic. While this is the basic approach that everybody uses to climb the serps, there is another way. Google loves websites that update often. I have built a website that has very few backlinks pointing to it that gets me 10,000 visitors a month from the search engines. The reason for this is because I regularly update my content.

I see webmasters spending so much time building backlinks to their websites every day. This is important of course, but if they actually spent an hour each day writing a new post for their website, they would get far more traffic further down the line. I know this works because I have used this approach many times in the past. With all the Panda’s and Penguins about these days, I have found my websites gain higher search rankings, simply because I always have fresh content on my sites. If you do not want to write every day, then write at least 3 times a week – it helps.

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/07/01/10-seo-and-link-building-mistakes/

What Most Webmasters Don’t Know About Their Failing Website Content

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Imagine your website content was so effective that every targeted visitor wanted to find out more information about your business.

Now wake up, because sadly, this is often not the case, even though it is entirely achievable.

How do I know this? I encounter dozens of websites on a weekly basis that not only fail to meet my standards, but also turn people away upon first visit.

“Why is my content so bad?”

If you are at all concerned that your website content isn’t up to par, you may want to continue reading.

Here are some reasons why webmasters have low-performing website content:
Design First

Most marketers spend the majority of their time and resources on website design. While design is an integral component of gaining leads and selling more products, if accompanied by poor-performing website content, the design is a waste. Design and content go hand-in-hand.
Lack of Knowledge

Many webmasters are not even aware that solid website copy is one of the components to successful marketing. Some are new to the internet marketing game and others never put two and two together. Your website content is the messaging that leads your visitors to take a desired action. It can make or break your online business.
Good Writing, Poor Content

If you write novels for a living, this doesn’t automatically translate into writing great website content. While grammar and word usage are one part of the formula, website content is completely different from other forms of prose.

If you write your website content with a novel-like approach, you will lose visitors within the first few seconds. They need their attention captivated fast!

Proper formatting of your website content is crucial for high conversions. Short paragraphs, bulleted lists, bolded emphasis and more, are essential to keeping visitors interested.
Purposeless Content

Even the best formatted content won’t keep visitors unless it speaks directly to them. Your website content is not a place to shout out how wonderful you think your products are. Your goal is to simply get users to take the next step, whether it to visit your product page, contact you, or opt in to your email list.

Each page has a specific purpose and must be targeted effectively. For brevity, I will target just the home page and list some common mistakes:

The home page is the most important because it is your first impression and where visitors will decide whether they want to leave or stay. Most webmasters fail to engage visitors on this page.

Some problems I encounter:

Trying to sell the farm – The goal of your home page is not the finish line unless you are writing content for a landing page. Your content should wet your visitors’ appetite enough so they desire to continue searching through your site. Just sell them on the next step, not the entire “kit and kaboodle.”

Target Audience – If you don’t know your exact market, you will never grab their attention. Before you write your home page content, identify the answers to these questions:

What are the main desires of your target audience as it relates to your industry?
What are their pain points?
What solutions do they need?
How can your product/services solve their problems?
What are their ages, income levels, status?

Too much content – In an attempt to squeeze in as much information as possible, webmasters clutter their home pages with excess content. Even if it is formatted correctly, it is still too much for visitors to take in. Resist the urge to add more and more. Less is more with website content.

Work on making what you already have MORE effective before adding any more content.

Quality trumps quality!
Where to Start?

If you notice any of these mistakes on your own website content, rectify them immediately!

In future articles I will discuss website content writing in more detail with detailed tips you can apply to your website right away. If you have some specific questions about your website content, feel free to list them in the comments below.

Happy Writing!

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/what-most-webmasters-dont-know-about-their-failing-website-content/

Don’t Stop Writing Articles Because of Google Penguin

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The Google Penguin algorithm update is nothing to worry about if you continue writing articles naturally, and without endless keyword repetition. The update has been designed to catch out those relying on ‘black hat’ web-spamming techniques to boost their rankings, and not those that have gained their ranking position fairly and honestly.

A search engine’s clients are those using it to find information, and Google is only trying to improve that service for its customers – and by assisting the search engine to achieve this you can take a big step towards a good ranking. Google is not particularly targeting poor quality content here, although you will suffer if your page text is full of unnecessary instances of your keywords. What concerns Google is the source of the links back to your website, and the anchor text you use that people click onto reach your individual web pages.

So that’s it basically – how to keep the Google Penguin algorithm update happy. To be more specific:

Your Web Page Content

Keep writing articles, but keep it natural and avoid keyword spamming. The Google Penguin update has been designed to detect what is known as webspam, a component of which is keyword stuffing – trying to influence spider algorithms by excessive use of a keyword in an article or web page content.

You should work to a maximum of around 1% keyword density. The more discerning article directories apply a keyword limit to your submitted articles. Ezine Articles for example applies a 2% limit – that includes similar terms, such as ‘article writing,’ ‘writing articles,’ and ‘write articles’ all being regarded as the same keyword; even ‘articles’ would be read as a keyword.

I would suggest using a keyword density of no more than 1%, if that. 2% should be regarded as a top figure.

Taking ‘golf balls’ as an example of a keyword you are using on a page in a golfing site, you would use the word ‘golf’ in terms such as ‘golf shoes,’ ‘golf apparel’ and many others. The algorithm has no idea of your intended keyword, so it will list what it believes appropriate from the semantics of your page. It will take ‘golf’ as a keyword and, if that exceeds a certain figure (nobody but Google knows what that is), your page is liable to be dropped a few places in the rankings for any of its keywords.

So write naturally and don’t worry about keyword density, other than to keep it low, although not so low that the main topic is lost. Forget numbers in your article writing, and write naturally and sensibly – as if you were speaking to the person reading your article.

Your Anchor Text

Many people use the same anchor text in their links time after time. Mix it up: when you are writing your resource, box or creating in-text links that readers can click, it makes sense to use your primary keyword or phrase as the anchor text (the text that is highlighted as a link). Avoid the use of the same keyword or phrase all the time. If your website focuses on article writing or article marketing, avoid the temptation to keep repeating the word ‘article’ in the text.

You can employ a number of alternative words, such as dissertation, essay, passage, content, copy and so on.’ Synonyms can often be difficult to find, particularly those meaning exactly the same in the same context, so if you are stuck for alternatives, check out an online thesaurus such as Thesaurus.com and you will find a whole host of them. You may lose the benefit of links back to your web pages if Google Penguin calculates your links as being over-repetitive (an algorithm is a mathematical formula and hence does not use human values).

Your Linking Strategy

The Google Penguin update looks for a diverse source for the links leading back to your web pages. Your search engine listing position will suffer if large numbers of backlinks come from the same website or from a recognized links farm. The same is true if your links are predominantly from poor quality web pages and pages not directly connected with the topic of those to which they link.

Mix your links between different sources, and also different types of source. For example, don’t have all your articles published on the same article directory. Make as sure as you can that the links leading back to your website (backlinks) are not all from the same source – or even similar sources, but are mixed between different article and web directories, Squidoo lenses, forums, blogs, private web pages, etc.. Make sure your links come from multiple sources.

So, if you avoid excessive keyword repetition, vary your anchor text and mix the source of your backlinks up, you can kick the penguin in the rear end and tell it to get lost. Google’s purpose is to provide its clients with a good search experience – the search engine is not particularly trying to punish you – and the Google Penguin update is how it is achieving that. So keep writing
articles!

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/06/26/dont-stop-writing-articles-because-of-google-penguin/

Hit the SEO Jackpot with Meta Descriptions

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I had an aha moment the other day while poring over the Google Analytics data for the niche site that I’m building. It’s currently ranking on the first page of Google for a handful of keywords, but the number of people who are actually clicking through to my site is leaving something to be desired.

Upon closer examination, I realized that I have two very distinct problems. First, the titles of my articles are excessively long. If you check out the newest Google updates for May, you’ll learn about the importance of short, accurate titles for your content. If a title appears too long, the Big G will select a shorter, more appropriate version to display in the results – and you don’t get a say in what that title will be. It’s best to select a title that contains your keywords but is also brief and relevant if you want to pass inspection.

For the purposes of this article, however, I’d like to focus specifically on meta descriptions. I stepped back from my website work this week and thought long and hard about what makes a person click on a site listed in Google’s search results. Think about it. What makes you click a link from the list?

For me, it’s the description of the page that appears below each title in the list. I use Google multiple times throughout the day, and I always scan the descriptions before I choose a site. I do this mindlessly – but once I really started paying attention to what I was doing, it dawned on me that the descriptions were the deciding factor that ultimately influenced my click.

You can have the most fantastic content in the world, but if you’re primarily depending on search traffic, then it won’t mean a thing if your meta descriptions are a drag. Let’s look at what exactly meta descriptions are and how you can use them to skyrocket traffic to your website or blog.

So… What Are Meta Descriptions, Anyway?

Meta elements are essentially coded definitions of different parts of your website, and they’re expressed in HTML or XHTML formats. Each meta element provides metadata about the pages on your site. For example, you may have some meta elements that specify particular keywords and page descriptions and others that define your site’s language or geographical attributes.

The meta element that we’re focusing on for this post is that of the meta description. You don’t see it on the actual website; it’s in the header code. To better illustrate this point, let’s look at the meta description for Google:

Google's Meta Description

Now, here’s how that meta description appears for users in the search results for Google’s website:

Google in Search Results

The information contained in the meta description for Google provides a succinct explanation of the content that users will find by visiting the site. Most search engines cut off descriptions somewhere around 160 characters, so sticking to 155 characters or less will help to ensure that your wording won’t be truncated.

A Brief History of Meta Descriptions

Meta elements were the hot ticket in SEO back in the late 90s. This was because the old school algorithms relied heavily on meta data to classify and rank websites in search results. With the right meta elements, websites could easily occupy the top spots for any given keyword. It didn’t take long for search marketers to get hip to this fact, and the revelation resulted in millions of websites dominating the SERPs with metadata-stuffed sites.

Obviously, the search giants had to regroup if they wanted to maintain the integrity of their listings. Search engine traffic was becoming more important as the Internet became more legit, so greater safeguards were put into play. Far less significance was placed on metadata in algorithms, and now bots have become so sophisticated that using the tactic for SEO is virtually obsolete.

Write for Humans, Not Search Engines

All that background brings me back to my original point. There is still a reason to focus on meta descriptions. Abig reason. People won’t click on your site if they don’t feel you have the solution to their problem. It’s as simple as that.

You must convince searchers that you have exactly what they’re looking for – and you have to do it in 160 characters or less.

You need to think of your meta description as ad copy. It’s the blurb that will sell your site, and therefore it’s arguably the most important part of the SEO you will do for your entire website. If you write something truly compelling, then you will certainly see an increase in your clickthrough rate (CTR). It’s that simple. You need to make searchers curious and lure them to want to learn more after reading your description – that’s what will draw in the clicks.

Tips for Writing Better Meta Descriptions

Now you know just how pivotal carefully crafted meta descriptions are for each and every page of your site or blog. They are ultimately what will convince a searcher to click through to your site. But what can you do to make your meta descriptions more appealing? Here are a few guidelines to help you during the writing process:

  • Use the keyword you’re targeting in your description. When you do, the keyword will appear in bold in your meta description when it appears in the SERPs. This won’t boost your ranking power, but it will certainly help to grab the reader’s attention.
  • If you’re using a blogging platform such as WordPress, try a plugin like the All in One SEO Pack. There are many more like it, and most will allow you to enter both the title and description that you’d like search engines to display. This eliminates the need for manual coding, which is always nice.
  • Make sure that you use a unique meta description for each page. Yes, it’s a huge pain. However, if you make it part of the writing process and you write the description directly after you write your article, I’ve found that it’s actually easy. You’re already in writing mode, and you know the most appealing points to describe since the topic is still fresh in your mind.
  • Don’t ever use quotes in your meta descriptions. It’s a great way to have your text cut off by the search engines.

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/hit-the-seo-jackpot-with-meta-descriptions-2/