SEO For The Common Webmaster

Ranking in the major search engines especially Google takes a lot of time and effort to achieve the right SEO results. There are many factors that play roles in optimizing your site for search engines. The major factor in SEO is link building.

There are several ways to build links pointing to your site. Many new webmasters choice the easiest route which is to just haphazardly place links on all over the Internet anywhere they can get a link. They also fall for link exchange schemes that are suppose to drive tons of targeted traffic to their website. This method will help bring a little traffic but it does very little to build solid organic traffic from the search engines and it does very little to move your site up in the search engine rankings.

The key is to build solid one way links that are from quality sites that are related to your niche or topic. These type of links take more work to find but will provide you long term results. Link building is not an overnight venture and a webmaster should be prepared for a lot of work to optimize their link building to achieve the results they want for their site. SEO work in general is not easy and it is an ongoing process.

Luckily, for those webmasters who are short on time, there are quality link building services that offer SEO services to help webmasters get the most bang for their buck. These types of services offer link building through commenting, in content links, blog roll links, and various other places on sites relevant to the webmaster’s niche. It is always better to hire out the service than to spend hours of your time if you have no idea what you are doing.

Link building is the most important factor is SEO. If your car broke down and you were not a mechanic, would you try to repair the car? If you have no idea how to optimize your website for the best results, hire an expert to do it. If you have the ability and know how, by all means, do the work yourself. However, if you lack the time and/or the skill to do a quality job, hire a reliable link building service to achieve the results for you.

When one creates a blog or website, a key is to find out if the effort is paying off. This can be seen in many aspects. We webmasters often want to see what our site is worth and what we need to work on. How much is your site worth?

This is a complex question. It takes a look at many factors from how many back links you have to your traffic stats. There are a few sites on the Internet that can track some of these stats for you and give a basic idea of where you are and how you are doing with your site. The problem I have run into is that when I want to check different stats, I have to jump all over the place to find different ones.

I recently ran across QPGR.com. They offer an updated set of Page Rank Checker & SEO Tools. This includes many of the standards used to judge a webmaster’s performance. Being located in one place relieves the stress and time of having to search all over the Internet to get all the stats you are looking for.

Their Quick Page Rank Checker gives you up to date rankings so you know what your current PR is. However, they also throw in Alexa traffic rankings, possible link sale value, site, value, back links, and more. The nice thing is, it takes only a few seconds to get the result of all of them with one simple tool.

These standard stats are not the end all to be all for a webmaster; however, it can give a nice sense of how you are doing. If you ranking and stats are super low for a given site, you know that you have a lot of work to do. If they are high, you know that you need to work to keep them there and you are inspired to work that much harder.

Checking your stats on a regular basis will allow you to find problem areas and improve on those to become more successful.

In previous posts, I have spoke of how important it is to build quality back links. In order for the links to be counted in both PR and SERPs, they need to be dofollow. However, it is sometimes hard to find dofollow links related to your website.This job has gotten a little easier.

I recently found this great Dofollow Directory that lists only sites that allow comments and that offer dofollow links. This is something I have personally been looking for and it is a great asset to webmasters everywhere. I tried on this blog to include a small list of dofollow blogs but their directory does a much better job of including many blogs and sites to leave comments on.

Unlike many dofollow list you find on webmaster forums, this directory allows the webs owner to Submit Dofollow Blogs. This means that these are sites that want and welcome comments and offer a quality link in exchange for a good comment. This saves lots of time because you will be commenting on related sites that want your comments.

The directory offers either free or paid submission and has several categories to cover all ranges of topics. Submitting is easy and is a great way to improve traffic for your dofollow blog. I suggest you look at the links I provided and find some great sites to submit your comments today.

Link baiting is a great way to build traffic to your site. However, many webmasters have no idea what link baiting is.

Linking baiting is writing or doing something on your site that will cause others to want to visit your site and link back to your site. There are many ways to do this.  Many sites do link bait with widgets and badges that are added to a website or blog with a link back to a site.  Good examples of this are social bookmarking sites like Digg.

Another example of link bait is writing something that is current breaking news. Many people will find it interesting and link to it. This is a little harder unless you have an inside track because news spreads so fast on the Internet.

Creating an unusual list or great tool that others find useful will get people to your site and wanting to link to it. One example is my post on here about checking for no follows. I have no idea how to incorporate the script in my post so I linked to the original creator’s blog because it is a helpful resource for my readers.

The final and most common way is to write something very controversial that will cause a stir and cause people to read it. This could be political, something funny, an attack on someone famous or any other idea. I wrote an article on my other blog on a religious topic. My plan was not link bait but it caused quite a stir and I had tons of traffic and lots of comments. This to me proved that it works.

If you decide to do link baiting, make sure you spread the word about your article. This can be done by placing it on news sites, social book marking sites, and on related forums. Link baiting is only good if others see it.

Many webmaster go crazy trying to get their site listed in one of the biggest directories on the Internet, DMOZ. I found that it could be a benefit to be listed but nothing to obsess over.

I will normally submit my site to them when I feel it is ready to be listed and then I forget about it. Most of my sites never get listed and many sites takes over a year to get listed. I submitted this blog once I had the theme set up and some good content and basically forgot about it.

Today, I was going through my blog stats and I seen some traffic from DMOZ and thought that it was strange. I clicked on over to their directory and lo and behold, my little old SEO blog was in the listings. I can not say that it will mean a lot but I hear that many directories pick up listings from them to feel their directories which will mean a possibility of many new back links. I do not get my hope up but it would be nice to generate some new traffic to increase the earnings for this blog.

Has anyone seen any real benefit from being listed? Please share your own experience by leaving a comment here.