What Are Testimonials?

In the online world, testimonials are positive comments posted on a website to demonstrate how happy previous/existing customers are. Testimonials are from people who are willing to recommend the service and put their name, even their face or company name, against their comment to vouch for what they’ve said. It is a known fact that they can increase conversion for many sites.

How Can You Use Them to Build Links?

Well, when a testimonial is displayed on the website is often links to the site of the person commenting. This is a valid link and, if you have an exact match domain, can be a great link to have – particularly if the comments are displayed on a websites home page and they are an established website with some level authority and trust.

If you are happy to submit positive comments to a company or website they should be more than happy to publish them – particularly if you are also an authoritative source or well known name or brand.

Have you tried this method of link building? Did you find it effective or difficult to implement? Would you include this as part of your link building campaign? Comment below.

Link from your stronger pages
There are bound to be one or more pages within your website that does particularly well, either in terms of PR or positions within the search engines.

You can give strength to your weaker pages by linking to them from your strong pages, building the overall strength of your website.

Link within your content
Add links within the text of your pages. It’s worth going through the content of each page and working out which phrases could be linked to another page.

You will have to make sure relevant phrases are selected and the pages they link to are within context and is a good idea to ensure that the anchor text of the hyperlink match those that you want the page to rank for and that they appear on the destination page, making the whole strategy much more effective.

Link from your footer
Now this approach is not only helps with your ranking strategy but also with usability, as it incorporates almost a mini site map on each of your pages.

You can link to some of your primary pages within your footer and can incorporate some longer keyword phrases. Again, the links will need to be contextual and link to a relevant page.

Links from newsletter and blogs
Having articles present in newsletters or blogs are other sources of internal links. If they are hosted on a separate domain these could be beneficial to your SEO and prove additional value. Even if they are hosted on your own domain they can be of value by contributing to your internal linking strategy.

Again, use relevant and contextual anchor text within the link back to the main website to help direct traffic to the most important parts of your website and build the link profile for your main interior pages.

Build a good site map
Another effective SEO technique that also helps with overall usability, building a good site map entails creating a page purely to include links to all of your pages in a user friendly and simple way.

Your site map should contain text links and not images and should include relevant anchor text that depicts what the user should find on each page as well as reflects the keyphrases each page is optimised for. For example you could not only include product names within the anchor text but also popular keywords for that page.

Do you have any other internal linking strategies that you’ve found to be useful? Please share below.

Getting your website to be ranked amongst the top of the major search engines is a very hard task. It is hard enough for new websites to try and beat off competition from millions of other websites to rank top of the search engines without Google making it even harder with the “sandbox”.

Google does not trust new sites which is why it would receive very little traffic. It is only when your website receives links that it starts ranking a lot higher on the search engines as Google begins to trust it a lot more.

This is one of Googles methods to ensure the website reaches the very top of the search engine. The whole process to get Google to trust your website could take up to 2 years. This is a long time to wait and it could mean your website does not survive.

Luckily, I have included some tips to help you get your website ranked higher in Google in less than two years.

Make your 1^st links high quality links

When you launch your website, make sure you gain links from high quality targeted directories. Doing this could dramatically increase the trust that Google has in your website and you could find yourself ranking higher in the search engines a lot quicker than you would if there are no high quality links to your website.

Get Google to trust your website

As mentioned above, it is great to gain links from relevant sites. It dramatically increases the ranking of your website. But does Google trust your website? For the majority of new websites, the answer would be no.

In order to build your trust in Google, it is beneficial for you to link from articles or blogs. These would need to have content which is relevant to your website in order to build up the trust by Google.

Build a spin off site

You may create your website from an existing section of one of your other more established sites.  An example of this is if you are a garden centre. You primarily use it as an e commerce site but you include a hints and tips section. You then decide to launch a separate site for hints and tips.

In order to carry traffic and rankings from the old hints and tips section, you could implement a 301 redirect which takes users from old hints and tips area onto the new hints and tips website.

In comparison, you on the other hand might have been working extremely hard to rank for that content, through numerous optimisation techniques including gaining quality inbound links yet still have very little to show for it. What people aren’t aware of is that these high ranking sites have managed to reach a high trust level within the search engines which allows their content to rank highly.

A lot of time and patience is needed to build trust within the search engines but here are 25 essential SEO tips that will help:-

• Ensure your whois record is up to date and make sure there’s a visible record of the domain owner including name, address, phone number and email address.
• There is a lot of debate surrounding this subject but it seems to be the case that better results can be achieved with top level domains so it’s well worth considering using a .com, .org, or .net etc domain.
• The age of the domain name is very important to Google therefore if starting a new online business you should definitely consider purchasing an existing domain name as opposed to  registering a  brand new one.
• If your domain contains more than 2 words it’s best to try and avoid the use  of hyphens in the URL as this can sometimes look spammy, for example www.RedCarCentre.net is far better than www.Red-Car-Centre.net.
• Google assumes that when starting an online business you’re in it for the long run so when buying a new domain or renewing its generally better to opt for a longer registration period of at least 2 years before its due for renewal.
• Used a clean fixed IP address and try to stick with it for the long run.
• Verify your site with Google Webmaster central , this will aid you to  learn of  negative issues your site may have which could effect  the amount of trust your site will be able to obtain.
• Clearly display your contact details including address and phone number on your site.
• If needed clearly display links to your  terms and conditions and privacy policy on your site and update site maps if necessary.
• Don’t go over the top with your sites optimisation as this flags up spam filters and is sometimes misinterpereted with the use of automated software which wont bide well within the search engines.
• Avoid creating too many cross links on other sites you own as again this can flag up spam filters within the search engines.
• Keep your sites content up to date, making sure you update regularly. This will show the search engines you are actively trying to provide useful information on a regular basis.
• Don’t use doorway pages that transfer you across to another website as becomes a big frustration to both visitors and the search engines.
• Try to obtain your inbound links organically.  People are becoming more and more reliant on the use of automated link buying/selling software which has lead to the search engines having a big cramp down on this type of strategy.
• Your backlinks anchor text should be varied and not always under that one term that you really want to rank well, by using a variation of anchor text it will help the search engines to see your links have been naturally created.
• Sites that link to your own ideally should contain as little other out going links as possible.
• Try to maintain your pages below 100K as this will make them more easily crawlable.
• Use an XML site map generator to create your site map and make sure you update it whenever you add or remove pages.
• Review your robot.txt file to make sure you’re not blocking certain parts of your website from being crawled and indexed.
• Build on your content to make the information you supply interesting and useful as this will make more people want to naturally link to your site from their own.
• You should work towards decreasing your sites bounce rate as a higher bounce rate is sometimes that your site isn’t supplying  relevant content.
• An inbound link from the three major human edited directories dmoz , Yahoo Directory and Best of The Web helps.
• Try to limit the amount of dofollow links to on your site to around 100.
• If using a new domain only link to trusted sites within your sector for the initial 6 months.
• Keep your content unique, the search engines can see when duplicate content has been used and this will hinder your sites performance within the search engines.

Now you know the basics start building your sites trust today…

A lot of people make the mistake of creating all of their links to just their home page thinking this will lead to their home page ranking top for all of their desired key terms. This is generally not good practice and if creating a large quantity of links can lead to the search engines thinking you are using some kind of automated software to generate your links which might see your site receiving a penalty or in worse cases being banned by the search engines.

Instead, take the time to create quality deep links to a number of your sites interior pages as well as the home page on an ongoing basis, gradually but consistently, and as your site will reap the rewards in the long run.

Digg until recently had always seemed like the safe bet however they have just announced that they too have added no follow attributes to their links meaning the submission of meaningless information will no longer prove beneficial in the attempt to climb the search engine rankings. Social media marketing has for too long been deemed a simple way of gaining links and the fact that it is actually an excellent marketing tool and a great way of gaining additional exposure for your business has been overlooked.

With the introduction of such websites as facebook and twitter social media marketing more than ever is a tool that can gain your website visitors that you wouldn’t normally be able to obtain. The key is to keep the information you are posting up to date, useful and sociable. If you are submitting mundane information that not many people are going to find useful then your social media life may be short lived whereas if you are keeping your posts short, snappy and about your latest services or new product launches then people will be far more interested and therefore far more likely to click through to your site to learn more about what’s on offer. If people are finding your information useful then its also likely they will make their online friends aware of your business which can lead to a large number of online supporters, gaining even more exposure for your business.

The best strategy to take is don’t just treat social media marketing as an inbound link but look at it as a way to gain hundred or even thousands of new customers and a great new awareness of your business and what you have to offer.

My opinion (based purely on my own experience) is that this can still be a great method of increasing positions and generating additional traffic, particularly for new websites of little or no traffic. Although exchanging links excessively can – and likely will – cause issues, here are a few guidelines to ensure you don’t overdo it and to help you get the most from your efforts.

Google can see excessive link building as just another link scheme. Although I can’t really see this as being as dangerous as being caught selling or buying links we should assume that if Google says it can impact your site’s ranking negatively then it probably can.

Only swap links with sites that are on a similar theme or topic to yours. As relevance in SEO is one major factor exchanging links with anyone you come across is not only a waste of your time and efforts but can also make it easier for search engines to work out that you are merely exchanging links for the link juice.

Exchanging links moderately with similar websites of a good quality will not be seen as a link scheme since it does help determine that others in your field see your site as being worthy to link to. Aside from this it also provides useful links to your users and can help drive traffic to both sites and raise awareness of each.

Ask for the link to be placed in a good position. If you are exchanging links with other blogs ask to be mentioned in a blog post instead of on the blogroll or sidebar. With this method you will need to extend the same courtesy since – after all -  it is a link exchange. If the link is on a website try asking to be placed within content or anywhere but in the footer. Also post the link at the same page depth into the site as your link can be seen on their website, for example a home page, deep interior page, links page.

Again, with the relevance factor being important use keywords within the anchor text of the link. We all know that using keywords in the anchor text is important in increasing the relevancy of your own site as well as its rankings. When exchanging links it’s a good idea to give a short list of keywords orphrases you prefer the other website to use as anchor text.

So there are some great guidelines to help you with your link exchanging efforts. Following these should help you steer clear of issues and get the most from your campaign. Just remember to keep things natural and relevant. If there’s anything else you can add to this list feel free to let us know by commenting below.

There are a lot of article marketing websites out there, most of which have a lot of power in the search engines with high PR’s meaning a back link from their site can be very useful useful in terms of SEO. Also because of their power it can mean that if the article is optimised correctly you can gain a top ten Google position under your chosen key term so its not only acting as a quality inbound link to your site but is also drawing traffic through its ranking positions.

The best performing articles are written in small paragraphs (3 to 4 lines in one paragraph) and tend to gain a higher click through rate (CTR) than articles written in big paragraphs. It’s probably due to the fact that small paragraphs increase the readability and scanning power therefore bring more traffic to your website. Try to include useful information in your articles as this will increase the probability of people linking to your article from their blog which will only increase its power.

Article marketing is undeniably a great way of gaining quality back links to your website, and if you create a few unique well written articles each week you will find over a few months that you traffic and web ranking steadily improves. Although using video marketing from sites such as you tube can achieve top positions quicker than that of articles its top ranking life is normally short lived. A good article tends to maintain its positions for a lot longer making it in my option the better option.

If you are adding content to your website on a regular basis and actively building links to this content using intelligent methods you are already building up the quality and trust of your website and will likely get rewarded with links to your content naturally, appearing over time and much more organically.

It would be better to know what types of content people feel are worth linking to and focusing on creating more of this kind of information (search Google to see what types of articles or news people are linking to). Good quality and interesting content is often much more link-worthy than a business website offering nothing but information on their service or products.

Sometimes you are much better off knowing that you’re adding quality content to your website that is interesting and useful to your target audience – both individuals and organisations. You can then contact the people that potentially would be interested in this content and let them know where to find it. Introduce them to your information and you may get rewarded with quality one-way links.

Just like you can’t throw a wide selection of keywords out there and hope that you prospective reader/client will find you, you can’t got out and try to get a link from what seems like every site on the planet. You have to be quite a bit more subtle than that. here are a few points.

• Be focused on what you are doing and who you are aiming for, this will also be of great help when finding the best keywords and key phrases.
• Try to remain focused on where you are geographically. This is also a must for keyword research.
• Find sites that are relevant to what you are doing, but don’t compete. If you run a pet shop, it’s best not to try and find a link partner that runs a shop too, even if you aren’t in the same town, but providers of pet insurance for example are fine.
• Try and gain inbound links from sites with a reasonable Google PR. Just because you are focusing on one area, it’s still not best to gain a link from every site you come across in that subject. Be selective, a handful of high PR links can be better than a long list of low ranking ones. And Google are working on having the effect of low PR links nullified.

Having a focused strategy will also save you a great deal of work hours since you wont be linking to every site you come across, which also saves you a great deal of eye strain from staring at your monitor.

SEO may seem like an impossible science at first, but there are many resources out there, with people more than happy to share what they know