If you need to promote your corporate website, you will find out that this is not an easy job. Self-promotion via forums or blog comments is often eliminated as SPAM and many website owners doesn’t like to link to your site because you offer a product or service. We all know that inbound links are important to get high-listed in search engines like Google. So what do you need to do to get links to your site? In this article we will suggest things which should work for most of the websites on the Internet. But first we need to change our mind:

To get inbound links you need content which is not just your product information or some sales page. Start creating content which is interesting for your target group AND related to your products.

What do you need?

• Beside your corporate website you need a blog. This blog might be a part of your website or if possible hosted on a second domain and IP address.
• You need to create unique and fresh content, related to your product and services. Hire a content writer if you can’t write the articles by yourself.
• You need time and maybe some money (more about the costs later)

Okay here are the natural link building ideas:

1. Write your blogs frequently
   If you have already a blog, I guess most of your articles are about your news, products and services. Keep writing them, but write also information which is “not about you”. For example if your product is Web Hosting, provide valuable information about how-to secure websites or give some other advice related to hosting or websites. If your articles are interesting even for non-customers, those people might write about on their own blog and will link to the source.
2. Write content for 3rd party websites
   Write articles on blogs, websites or networks like HubPages.com, EzineArticles.com or blogs which allow other authors to write for them. In these articles it’s possible to add also links to your site.
3. Promote all articles via social networks
   This one important, if you post your article-links to your twitter or facebook profile, more people will know about your blog and the chance is bigger that other people will blog about your article. Try also sites like Digg.com or delicious.
4. Get links from customers or partners
   Ask your customers and partners for a link from their website. Start with the partners where you buy products and services, they might give some link back because you’re a customer. For your own customers it’s more effective to offer something for free.
5. Offer freebies
   Provide in some of your own blog posts a free gadget, e-book or service. Freebies are always a welcome subject to write about. Be creative and you will get many free links!
6. Submit your press releases
   Write press releases about your most important news and submit them to press release submission services. There are many of them (check Google), try also paid services like PRWeb.com, this way you’re able to reach many people which might pick up your news and will write about (incl. link). If you can’t write a press release article by yourself, hire a copy-writer.
7. Ask for a product review
   Search related websites or blogs and ask the owner to review your product or service in exchange for a free product. Get this way a link and also some publicity (works great if your product is a service).
8. Create a second blog
   If you’re able to produce enough unique content or articles, start a second website or blog. Host this website on by different web-host and don’t link this site from your other sites. If  you keep this site “product neutral” you can even write about your competitors products and services. Build links from different sections to your site.

We didn’t mention here the reciprocal link exchange and paid links because those are against the Google webmaster guidelines. Exchanging links is not forbidden, but don’t have too much of them.

Do you know some nice link building techniques? Please share them below as a comment, thanks!Similar Posts:

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Today I read about the new search options on this Google Blog and thought great more control. I didn’t understood why people should use the Blog Search feature from Google because I was never that satisfied as the regular search.

Using the new search options I tried some searches and selected the Blog filter as well. I was very surprised to find in the Blog search result a few duplicates from my Blog post two weeks ago.

First I thought maybe my blog was not so relevant at the moment, but after I switched off the Blog filter I found my Blog post at the top of the list.

I know that the Blog search has some great real time results but this make no sense. Google shows some excepts or duplicates instead of the original content. Similar Posts:

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This is part 2 in our series on how to optimize your Wordpress blog for Google. In our earlier post we discussed how to avoid the duplicate content penalty when blogging with the Wordpress blogging software; today, we are going to share how to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engine friendliness especially for the Google search engine.

Interlinking your blog posts

Since your blog should be topically related anyway, you should have no problem referencing previous post from time to time in new blog postings. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to edit your older blog postings to include topically related links for new posts. Not only does this help to improve your internal linking structure, it can also help improve keyword relevancy for certain pages if you’re using keyword focused, or descriptive, anchor text for your internal URL’s.

Another approach to boost the link popularity and improve the visibility of your blogs internal pages is to offer a sitemap, one which will benefit users and work to help with search engine spidering.

XML sitemaps, such as the type used within your Google Webmaster account area, are only read by search engine robots. By offering a “static” sitemap, (though really it’s generally dynamically generated), you are giving your website visitors a location where they can easily browse your blog posting titles and find topics that interest them. You can manually update a sitemap page (not recommended for large websites or blogs), or you can hire a programmer to build a page that queries the Wordpress database and lists all the postings. There is also a Wordpress plugin that will build a sitemap for your blog, the Sitemap Generator Plugin; it’s one of the more feature-rich sitemap generators available for Wordpress.

For those of you who are only interested in using an XML sitemap for your Wordpress blog, the Google Sitemaps Generator will build one for you, and this XML sitemap generator will create a sitemap that can read by Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN as well.

Post high quality and useful content

Natural link building comes about by offering useful content; if you give your website visitors what they are looking for, a percentage of your blog readership will link to what they find useful or helpful. Continually posting informative and helpful content on your blog almost guarantees a steady flow of new incoming links without any additional work on your part all while increasing your blogs’ link popularity and overall visibility.

Optimizing your Wordpress blog for Google

Now that you’ve taken steps to alleviate duplicate content from your blog and are working on building the link popularity of your blogs’ inner pages, it’s time to optimize your Wordpress blog for ultimate search engine friendliness.

Create search engine friendly URL’s

Wordpress blogs, by default, display the posting pages using a query string to represent the individual pages, such as:

http://exampleblog.com/?p=16

Now, search engines have come a long way since their conception and most major search engines can crawl and will index what appear to be dynamically generated pages using query strings, but setting up search engine friendly URL’s will not only help to improve relevancy for the pages for certain keywords, using descriptive URL’s can increase the clickthrough rates from the SERPS (search engine results pages) as well.

To set up search engine friendly URL’s, simply login to your Wordpress administration area, then click on Options>>Permalinks. On the permalinks page, you will see a selection of choices and radio buttons. Most users opt for the Date and Name Based option, though if you know what you’re doing, you can choose the custom option and input your desired posting link structure.

Once you’ve setup your search engine friendly URL’s, you’ll likely need to modify your website’s .htaccess file unless yours happens to be writable by default.

Example .htaccess code for Wordpress Blogs

The code below is an example of what you would add to your .htaccess file:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]


This code is posted for example purposes only, and it is not guaranteed to work on your server.

A word of caution: modify your .htaccess file with extreme caution! Before you update this file, you should create a backup; this way, if for some reason your website messes up because of the code you have added, you have a working backup of the file.

For additional information about Wordpress Permalinks, you can checkout more information on using permalinks on the Wordpress website.

Add unique page titles to your Wordpress blog

A web pages title is the most important “on site” element in regards to optimization for search engines. By default, Wordpress forces the posting title as the page title itself, and is considered by top seo professionals as an optimization faux-pas. You should absolutely have unique page titles for every page of your blog, and you should avoid replicating the page title in your heading tags when at all possible.

Probably the most effective Wordpress title optimization plugin is the SEO title tag plugin. This plugin allows you to create a unique title for your blogs’ home page, any supplemental pages, your category and archive pages as well as for each and every post on your blog. As an added bonus, you can “bulk modify” up to 20 pages at a time, so if you happen to have hundreds of posts on your blog already, it’s not too much of a chore to make each of them unique.

For best results when creating titles for your blog posts, the titles should be keyword targeted, concise with the pages contents and descriptive enough to encourage clickthroughs from the SERPS. Your most important keyword or keyword phrase should be placed at the beginning of the title, and you should keep the titles short, at least this is generally the recommended method amongst optimization professionals.

Adding meta keywords and descriptions to your Wordpress blog

The age-old discussion about whether the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag is beneficial for search engine optimization today will undoubtedly continue, but there’s one thing for certain; if you add these meta tags to your blog respectfully, without trying to keyword stuff unrelated phrases or insistently repeating words over and over, these tags certainly haven’t been proven to hurt your rankings.

In fact, if you haven’t yet noticed, a while back Google started using the Meta description tag in their search results. Whether or not this translates into improving rankings has yet to be officially determined, but Google is certainly putting the Meta description tag to use, that is undeniable.

Probably the easiest to use Meta tag plugin for Wordpress is the Add Meta Tags plugin. With this plugin you can specify the meta keywords and meta description for your home page, category pages and each unique posting page. Using this Wordpress plugin with the SEO title tag plugin offers a powerful plugin combination that is certain to improve the overall search engine friendliness of your Wordpress blog.

While the tips outlined in this 2 part series on how to optimize your Wordpress blog for Google will undoubtedly help to improve the overall search engine friendliness of your blog, it cannot be understated that if you want your blog to be successful, you need to offer something to your readership that will keep them coming back for more. In the end, people don’t care that you’ve spent days, months, or even years promoting and optimizing your blog for search engines; if you aren’t giving people something that is beneficial to them, your blog will end up in the “blog graveyard” amongst the MFA splogs and the outdated blogs of yesteryear. No form of optimization can make up for a blogs failure to share informative and useful information with its readers.

Now, if you already have the “unique and useful” content squared away, by using the tips outlined within this 2 part series, you will be doing what 80% of your competition isn’t doing, thus exponentially increasing your chances of higher rankings in the SERPS, more natural visitors and ultimately more money to your financial bottom line.Similar Posts:

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How to avoid the duplicate content penalty when using a Wordpress blog

There’s no denying it, Google is the powerhouse of the internet; more than capable of showering targeted visitors on your website like a torrential downpour backed by gale-force winds. That is, if you happen to be in Google’s good graces and rank highly for popular keywords.

Bloggers often times find themselves in the position to receive great traffic from Google simply because of the way that blogs work; namely, they allow for quick inclusion into major search engines even when using the default setup. Being the most popular blogging software on the planet, Wordpress blogs are the content management system (CMS) of choice for bloggers due to ease of use and the large community of supporters that help to develop plugins for this open source blogging software.

However, just because Wordpress blogs can help websites to get noticed by the major search engines easily, this doesn’t mean that they are inherently search engine friendly; in fact, the default settings for Wordpress blogs almost guarantee that, if left untouched, your blog will end up suffering from the duplicate content penalty.

The duplicate content penalty and Wordpress blogs

The duplicate content penalty is a term that is used to describe what happens when a web page is removed from the primary search results for a certain keyword phrase due to identical content elsewhere on the internet. In Google, the lower-ranking websites and individual pages that contain the duplicate content are hidden, and this phrase is displayed instead:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the X (number) already displayed.

This happens primarily in two situations; with article marketing, A.K.A. article directory submissions, and when you post content to an unmodified blog. Since this article is focused on Wordpress blog optimization, we’ll focus on how you can avoid the duplicate content penalty for the latter.

Unmodified Wordpress blogs are search engine “unfriendly”

By using a Wordpress blog with its default setup, you are creating an atmosphere where your blogs’ content is almost guaranteed to suffer from the duplicate content penalty. The reason for this is simple: By default, your Wordpress blog will have the exact same content, word for word:

1. On the blogs main page
2. Within the blogs RSS feed
3. On the category page
4. On the monthly archive page
5. On the posts unique page

Clearly, having 5 different instances of the exact same content within a single website will undoubtedly lead to your content being seen as “duplicate” content by Google, and other major search engines for that matter.

Avoiding the duplicate content penalty with a Wordpress blog

There are a couple of things that can be done with your Wordpress blog that will help you to keep your blog in the primary search results:

Limit the text shown on your blogs pages

The duplicate content penalty comes about due to large amounts of significantly identical text being shown on numerous pages throughout the internet, not a few characters or even a couple of sentences. Wordpress blogs allow bloggers the option to use what is called the “more” tag, where they can limit the amount of text that is displayed on the blogs main page, the category pages and the archive pages. By utilizing this tag, Wordpress users are limiting the content for a post to be displayed, in full, only on the posting page itself; thus removing four of the five aforementioned instances of locations of duplicate content when adding a post to their blog, which can help to decrease the chances of being affected by the duplicate content penalty.

However, if you have an established blog – it would be a cumbersome chore to edit every existing post, not to mention it’s another step you would have to endure to use this option for all future posts. Fortunately, there is a Wordpress plugin that will replicate the effects of the “more” tag, yet not requiring you to manually add it to your blog posts.

Evermore Wordpress Plugin

The evermore Wordpress Plugin will replicate the effects of the “more” tag, effectively limiting the amount of text shown on your blogs main page, category page and archive pages. You have the ability to specify the character limit, so you can have more or less text displayed in these other areas depending on your needs. Installing this plugin is as easy as uploading a file via FTP to your Wordpress plugin directory, and the effects can be reversed completely by deactivating it.

Choose “Summary” for your blog’s RSS feed file

Another way to help stop the chances of becoming the next victim of the duplicate content penalty is to simply change the settings from within your Wordpress blogs administration area.

Once you’re logged into your blogs administration area, go to Options>>Reading. Under the sub-heading “Syndication Feeds”, select the “summary” option. This will effectively cut down your chances of suffering from the duplicate content penalty.

Using the robots.txt file to keep Google (and other search engines) away

Now, of course you want search engines to crawl your blog, but in some cases it’s not in your best interest to have all of your pages crawled and indexed by all search engine robots. Another trick to helping you avoid the duplicate content penalty is to tell the Googlebot to stay away from your RSS feed. Some bloggers even go so far as to disallow the Googlebot from crawling their blog archives and category pages, but that is a personal preference; in all honesty we have yet to see conclusive evidence as to which approach is best. Here is an example of a set of commands that will help you to keep the Googlebot from accessing your blogs feeds.

Sample robots.txt file to disallow the Googlebot from your RSS feed

(if your Wordpress blog is at the root of your domain)


User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /feed/rss/$
Disallow: /trackback/$


You can check out some advanced commands for your Wordpress blogs robots.txt file on the Ask Apache website. As with any modifications of this type, you should implement changes with extreme caution as improperly forming commands to your robots.txt file may cause it to be excluded from search engines all together!

Using the tips and tricks outlined here, you can help keep your blog in Google’s primary index and avoid the duplicate content penalty that many other bloggers suffer from. It goes without saying that one of the major contributing factors to the duplicate content penalty is syndicating articles from article directories; and for best results it’s always suggested that your blog is comprised of unique content rather than syndicated content.

This article is a 2 part series on how to optimize your Wordpress blog for Google. In our next article, we will show you how to optimize your Wordpress blog for ultimate search engine friendliness and also how you can pull your blog out of Google’s supplemental index as well as covering ways to stay out of it.Similar Posts:

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Like a lot of other weblogs this “Web Development Blog” has lost today 2 points in PageRank (went from 5 to 3). A week ago I had the idea that this blog will get a PR6 based on the information I got via the Google webmaster tools. After reading about PR drops from Andy Beard, Tim Nash, Darren Rowse and several others I noticed that all of them (including me) thought the reason could be some link sales. So maybe all of us tried to sell a link some time ago?

Text Link Ads

I think most of all websites with content for webmasters link to this website because they pay $money for referrals and I saw a lot of high quality blogs on their “Link Market Place”. Maybe is the affiliation with TLA is the reason for lot of this PR drops. TLA has a PR zero since several weeks and was maybe one of the first sites getting a PR drop (edit: they got a penalty from Google, you can’t find them on their company name). I remember me that TLA has send us new affiliate links using a TinyURL; some action to safe what was left? I removed my website from the TLA market place because I never earned something and also the prices from my TLA competitors are so high that I can’t believe that there are a lot of people making the “big” money there. I know some webdev site with a PR6 (or 7) was selling links for several hundred $ a month, this website has a PR 4 now.

I think Google has indexed the whole TLA market place and will change the PageRank for the listed sites now or later. Maybe is the affiliation with TLA already enough to loose PageRank points (who knows).

Victim or offender?

For those who sold links in a large scale like some paid directories I understand that Google has give a penalty to those sites, but what about those site from blog owners never sold (active) a link? In the past a high PageRank was a kind of compliment from Google to the owner thats he has done a good job in SEO. Today I need to think about every link placement if it’s maybe bad for my website.
Is this how we need to work in the future doing the work for search engines because some logarithms doesn’t work for 100%?Similar Posts:

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Often people doesn’t like to use Flash websites because Google can’t “read” the text inside a flash movie. In the past people used a mirror HTML version to get in the SERP’s of Google and other search engines.

These days I read about some nice project the SWFObject a nice JavaScript solution that enables Flash user to detect the Flash plug-in for each browser. Actually there is no more OBJECT, PARAM or EMBED element in the HTML code required because this is done by the SWFObject. Using this object the security issue that comes with Internet Explorer belongs to the present (people don’t need to click twice to access a Flash element). How is this working? This is the code you need to add a Flash movie to you web page?

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
<div id="flashcontent">
    This text is replaced by the Flash movie.
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var so = new SWFObject("movie.swf", "mymovie", "400", "200", "8", "#336699");
    so.write("flashcontent");
</script>

1. Just include the SWFObject JavaScript file
2. add some DIV container which is used to position the Flash movie
3.  and finally we create/call the SWFObject to play the movie, easy?

With DIV container it’s possible the to add alternative content which is invisible for visitors using the Flash plug-in or just for search engines!

Just in case your flash movie is some nice and dynamic product presentation with a product title, a description and a product photo, please this information using a header element, a paragraph and an image (don’t forget the “alt” tag). This way people without a flash player (and Google) can see am alternative version of your website.

Is this method valid according the Google Quality guidelines?

Yes it is, at least this is what they say:

If you’re using text to try to describe something search engines can’t access – for example, JavaScript, images, or Flash files – remember that many human visitors using screen readers, mobile browsers, browsers without plug-ins, and slow connections will not be able to view that content either. Using descriptive text for these items will improve the accessibility of your site. You can test accessibility by turning off JavaScript, Flash, and images in your browser, or by using a text-only browser such as Lynx…

Wait, placing hidden text and links is fine if you’re using Flash? I remember me some blog post I wrote about hiding text for modern navigation methods or Ajax powered web forms. If this method is valid for Flash then it should be also valid for other website development techniques like Ajax or CSS/JavaScript.

I think hidden text is still bad because people can use it to hide text from the user like and alternative product description using keywords which belongs to some other brand or concurrent company. Will Google fight this back like they do with websites selling links? I hope their budget for new employees is strong enough…

Sponsor: Flash website templates & Flash Intro TemplatesSimilar Posts:

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Any web developer knows it:

Create websites according the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines!

If you read the current blog post from Google Webmaster Central these Guidelines are not changed. Only the help pages are extended and give more information about each rule.

About the rule “Hidden text and links” there is the following information available:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including: Using white text on a white background, Including text behind an image, Using CSS to hide text, Setting the font size to 0 (zero)

I know a lot of modern Ajax/JavaScript function are using some text which is hidden by CSS (display:hidden) and upon some event this text (content) becomes visible. This is not some of “Black hat SEO” but just using some JavaScript behavior to create nice and modern effects on a web page.

OK, I didn’t any site which is blacklisted from Google because of this kind of “violation” against the Google quality guidelines but what this clarified rules are the beginning of some new strategy to punish more websites? Remember that bigger sites like from BMW or TemplateMonster got banned because of violating the Google guidelines a few years ago. So what happens next?Similar Posts:

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Is Google PR getting more importance than is due to it? It would seem so considering the barrage of threads on different webmaster forums with respect to the impending PR update. DP, Sitepoint, Namepros all have various threads where one of the members seems to have noticed a PR change to one of his sites and declares that the PR update is underway. There are numerous replies to such threads, most of them inconsequential.

Originally, PR was designed in such a way so that the importance of a page could be identified based on a number from 0 to 10 – 0 being lowest importance and 10 being the highest. The logic is, if more sites link to your site, then yours is an important site and has relevant content. Fair enough. It went wrong when webmasters were able to manipulate the PR by linking their own sites to each other and also by buying links from other sites. This meant that sites with no valuable content could have higher PR than other sites which are more useful.

Alexa is another system which tried to rank websites. This was done based on the number of visitors visiting a site. Tracking was/is done by the Alexa toolbar. Since the number of people using the toolbar is miniscule the data captured is also skewed. Again webmasters have been known to manipulate results by setting their own site as the homepage in their own system with the Alexa toolbar installed!

It is apparent that both Alexa and PR are not a true reflection of the worth of a site but webmasters continue to patronize them. Usually the cost of a link on a website or the value of the website itself changes dramatically with a better Alexa and PR. Even though a number of webmasters agree that PR has no relevance, it will survive as long as there are webmasters obsessed with the ‘little green toolbar’ .

Share your views on what should be a better way to rank websites. Should it be a composite way by integrating the Alexa and Google PR algorithms? Or should it be based on a feedback system like StumbleUpon? Or is trying to rank websites itself a bad concept considering that it is so qualitative?Similar Posts:

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I started six month ago with Google Page Creator (GPC) to use it for a kind of personal log about projects and websites. I created a three page website in Dutch language to get some experience about the features and I think it’s an easy to use tool but with basic possibilities.

I got also a PageRank of 4 after the first PR update! The bad site is that I have almost ZERO visits because the pages are not high listed in Google. Next I thought, maybe it’s because of the dutch language, thats why I translated the page into the English language this weekend.

On th other site, I can’t remember that I found any GPC in the Google SERP’s within the last 6 month… Maybe because Google doesn’t spider/search their own Google (GPC) pages? The pages of my GPC site are listed in the search engine if I use the “site:” command, but I need a 4-5 words phrase to get my pages listed…

I hope the existents of GPC pages within the top50 of the SERP’s is possible, otherwise this tool is worthless in times of MySpace, Squidoo and other Web 2.0 communities.Similar Posts:

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No, I don’t think so, but finally there is a standard for website submission in our sight. The three biggest search engines will continue the development together of the sitemap format introduced by Google. Finally you need only one sitemap to include all your websites pages into these three search engines!

Read here the original Google Blog post and visit also the new Sitemap project website.Similar Posts:

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