One of the greatest ways to build authority links is by doing article marketing, and submitting to article directories. Of all the articles directories online – the one with the greatest authority, and highest popularity is by far Ezine Articles. They have a challenge going on right now (with prizes) to write 100 articles in 100 days (HAHD). A LOT of people have already signed up, and I did last night committing to follow through with 100 of my own articles. I just submitted my first two today – only 98 to go! I’ll keep you posted on my progress. You can read about it more in my HAHD Challenge post.

When you’re building backlinks – sometimes people forget that directory submissions are pretty much the best kind you can get! As they age they get even more valuable as the pageranks rise, and despite the fact that the higher pagerank directories charge a pretty penny for listings – you can still get listed for free in all kinds of free directories, many of which only require a reciprocal link back. Blog commenting is something you have to do constantly, but with a directory you only have to submit your site one time to get in!

Here’s 5 free directories to get you started:

Surf Safely: Pagerank 4 directory accepting free submissions, but you must have a PICS label and family safe.

Flookie: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy to submit to.

Resource Help: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions for reciprocal link back.

Zoomdir: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, but if you do reciprocal link you’ll get listed in just days (vs. months with no link back).

Zico Sur: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy submit.

If you want to know even more about directory submission (including where to find 500+ high pagerank directories), read my more in depth post High Pagerank Directories for Quality Backlinks.

Firefox SEO extensions can help you dramatically if you do SEO on a regular basis. For years many of us have been manually doing research by hand for the details we can gather on competing sites in SERP’s. You go to yahoo to check backlinks, you check indexed pages in google, you check Alexa ranking, you check domain age. You might even snoop around to see if the site has a sitemap or robots.txt file. It’s a time consuming ordeal – isn’t it?

Believe it or not, there’s a free extension for firefox that can do all these thing and more! It’s called “SEO Quake”. Once you install it, it has 2 “modes”. One is “toolbar” mode, and it can display all the SEO attributes about a site in a toolbar at the top of Firefox. The other is a “SERP” mode, where it can append the google results and tell you all the SEO attributes of search results as you research your competitors like this:

See how it appends each search result with pagerank, backlinks, alexa ranking, etc? You just have to be careful when you setup this plugin to have it get results “on demand” (only when you tell it to), or you can get your IP banned from search engines for too many lookups.

If you don’t want something that heavy duty, I’ll give an honorable mention to the SEO Firefox extension Search Status. It puts a very simple tool in the status bar of firefox which shows the pagerank and alexa rankings of sites you browse. This is very handy as well.

What Firefox SEO extensions do you use?

It’s been a hot debate for a really, really long time now, does image alt text count for SEO in web pages? I’ve probably seen this argued as many times as whether or not the meta keywords tag really matters for search indexing and SEO. After some research and trial and error over the years, I have to say that it does, but only for long tail keywords. If you’re targeting some broad search terms like “ipod nano” – sorry, the image alt text isn’t really going to help you against the stiff competition. However, if you’re targeting long tail keywords like “fix broken ipod nano” then alt text in images can really help you!

You see, broad terms are usually one or two words that get tens of thousands (or more) searches per day. Long tail keywords are 3+ works that are very targeted and usually get 5,000 or less searches per day. If you add your keywords into the alt text of an image on a page you’re trying to get ranked, I’m pretty certain that in most case it will boost you up there in the SERPs. Read my other post about it Image Alt Text: SEO or No SEO?, and I think you’ll agree.

Are you using keyword laden alt text on your sites now?

I just saw that the SEO Ultimate Wordpress Plugin was released as a submission entry in the 2009 Wordpress Plugin Competition. Personally, I’ve used wpSEO for years now, which I wrote about on this blog, but many use kind of the de-facto standard for SEO in Wordpress, All in One SEO Pack. Many have switched to Platinum SEO Pack because of it’s auto-handling of 301 Permanent Redirects and permalinks breaks.

The exciting thing about SEO Ultimate isn’t really what the plugin contains today, but what it plans to do in the very near future. It has some of the basic features that All in One SEO has, and it even (currently) does 404 Notification. But in the future you’ll have to ability to do robots.txt editing, 301 logging, and XHTML validation checks.

Check out SEO Ultimate, it may be the new Wordpress plugin to watch!

I think that too many people forget how good internal inks are for SEO. If you want to increase your rankings in the search engines start linking your own posts on your blog! It will increase your listings in the Serps, but it will also be better for your blog because you will be highlighting and bringing up your old posts all the time.

When you write on a topic – link your previous posts about similar topics. In fact, think about installing a plugin like Aizatto’s Related Posts. You can create specific pages rounding up posts into a “series”. You can feature certain posts on your home page. All these are great ways to build internal links. There’s even a plugin called RB Internal Links that helps you browse for and find previous posts to link to using Wordpress short codes.

Build internal links and watch your search rankings increase!

Commenting on other blogs is one of the best sources of traffic you can find and even better way to build backlinks. But how do you know that your time is being rewarded? You certainly don’t want to spend hours and hours leaving comments that are link dust in the wind do you? Here’s an example – let’s say that you are promoting your own business by leaving business cards on bulletin boards and check out counters. Would you waste your time leaving them in places where nobody would see them? Would you leave them in business that get virtually no customers at all? Of course not. You would leave them in the places that would do you the most good, big stores with with lots of customers.

So, due the same due diligence when leaving comments. First of all know what links are all about. Know that there is the normal way to (html) code them, and then there is the “nofollow” way. The “nofollow” tag added to an HTML hyperlink means that you link to something and tell the search engines to “ignore it”. So if you comment on a blog using “nofollow” tags the search engines will ignore the link above you comment. There is a “dofollow” movement, and dofollow Wordpress plugins you can use to remove the nofollow tag blog-wide. All you have to do is search google for “dofollow blogs” to find seemingly endless lists of blogs that you can comment on that are more beneficial than others. The only thing I can think of better is to look for lists of dofollow blogs that have decent google pageranks. You could go a step beyond that and look for Alexa rankings under 100K too, but I think that a list of dofollow blogs with decent pagerank is a good start.

Do you have decent dofollow lists that you use? Comment below now……

Hopefully my “SEO Tips for Blog Titles” will help you to bring more organic traffic to your blog from search engines. Over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at writing blog titles, meaning titles for blog posts, blog pages, blog categories and tags, and so on. I’ll give you some tips that are easy to use and remember – and you should be getting more traffic to your blog or web site in no time! The thing to remember is that this is kinda like a recipe, and you have to use all the ingredients in order for it to be effective.

Write good linkbait

It’s probably more important that you write effective titles than the actual page or blog post itself because the title is what gets people there in the first place. This is more marketing than it is SEO, but you need to write a title that makes people curious so they actually “want” to click it. On the Internet, and in Internet marketing we call this “linkbait”, because it’s like you’re setting a trap to get as many people to click as possible. Basically it’s just hype and learning to write a good catch phrase, but you have to combine that with the other tips I’m going to write about next.

Don’t go Nuts on Title Length

Keep your titles to less than 75 characters and try to use as few words as possible while keeping it to the point.

Bad Title Examples:
I think my new ipod touch really sucks and I hate it like the plague!
There are many ways to eat healthy without cutting out the things you love to eat.

Good Title Examples
iPod Touch Review or iPod Touch
Healthy Eating Alternatives or Eating Healthy Without Sacrifice

Theh point here is to use your title to synopsize what the post is about in few words, don’t write your titles like real everyday language. Don’t ramble on, don’t use words that people aren’t going to use in search anway – which brings us to our next seo tip…

Use just a few really effective keywords

Do a little keyword research and find out what people are searching most for in relation to your post. Use this Keyword Research Cheatsheet to get started. You might find that “iPod Touch Review” gets 1,500 searches per month for “iPod Touch sucks” gets only 500. A little research goes a long way and might get you more traffic in the long run (making you more money). Don’t go hog wild combining keywords either because you will reduce their effeciveness. For example, use the iPod Touch Review phrase by itself, don’t say something like “iPod Touch Review – It Sucks”, it won’t work as well.

Repeat Keywords Sparingly

Use keywords that you will repeat just a few times at the beginning of and in your post or page content. Don’t go hog wild thinking that if you repeat them a thousand times it will help – it won’t. It will just piss off google and your page won’t rank well. When you repeat the keywords in your title in the first paragraph of your content, and possibly one (at most two) more times it’s the most effective.

Link internally AND externally with keywords from titles

In the last tip I showed you how to make title keywords more effective by re-using them once or twice in your blog content as “reinforcement”. Your blog titles will become even more effective when you reuse the keywords in links that point to the page. The search engines love it when the page title and the links that point to it are the same.

You can do this two ways:

Internal Linking:
Internal linking is when you link your own pages within your blog. Do you do this? You should! Like if I said check out my previous post about blog optimization tips – that’s an internal link. This not only gets people to read previous posts and keeps them on your site, google counts both internal and external links – and it should be a regular part of your link building strategy.

External Linking:

This is the type of link building most people know, where other sites link to your pages and posts. Naturally over time other web sites and blogs will link to you and usually the text they use will be slightly different. If your site is “Bob’s Used Auto Parts”, many people would link with that text. However, you probably want to come up for searches for “used auto parts”, and you should work on getting links with that phrase as well. This is a fine line, because google will reward you for multiple links with the same keyword phrase, but the last thing they want to see is 50 brand new external links in a week that all say “used auto parts”. Google would rather these links acquire naturally over time, and it would look more natural if most of them had text of “used auto parts”, but there were a dozen or more different variations of it. You have to be careful when building your own external links, that they look a bit more like you acquired them naturally over time from different sources.

Summing up SEO Tips for Blog Titles

It’s important that you use the tips combined as recipe for better blog and web page titles. If you use only one or two – they won’t be as effective. That’s why the last two tips I gave you weren’t specifically for blog titles, but tips that helped you make them even more effective in bringing you quality traffic!

Targeting keywords for better SERP rankings is a really good strategy for building incremental and additional traffic in your blog.

I’m going to give you an example scenario of how to rank well for a completely new set of keywords, meaning your blog URL, title, description, and keywords you’re using now are something different. For instance – let’s say your domain name is “cookinghealthy dot com”, but you want to start coming up for the phrase “free recipes”. You found that keyword phrase gets 20,000 searches a month and you want to grab some of that exposure (without diluting the SERP’s you already position well on).

It’s very important that you understand what you are doing here, and why you are doing it. If you have a brand new blog (under 100 posts) – continue to hammer away at your main keywords used in your home page title, description, and domain name until you get good search results for it. Then, slowly develop a list of additional keyword phrases to work on over time. The theory of “not putting all your eggs in one basket” is why it’s best to do this. Just like having multiple blogs and multiple monetization streams, multiple keyword phrases (for one blog) generating traffic will make sure that your always getting traffic, and over time these keyword phrases are like sowing seeds in a garden. With care, some will grow beyond your wildest imagination.

So, in this scenario I want to come up as high as possible for “free recipes”, but the competition is pretty stiff. I would come up with a game plan to change that, and this is what I would do:

10 Step Keyword Ranking Process

1. Write a recipe post and make the title “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here”
2. In the first 15-20 words of the post say something like “My collection of <b>free recipes</b>: Recipe-Name-Here is so delicious you’ll want to make it again and again” (use different description phrase each time)
3. Write a post 5 days a week for a month using the same “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here” title and intro sentence strategy
4. After the first post create a Wordpress “page” simply titled “Free Recipes” with 1-2 paragraphs of original content (100-200 words), and create a linked list of the recipes posts – adding them as you go
5. Add a “related posts” block to the bottom of posts, so all the free recipe posts show other ones
6. In other posts (that aren’t about free recipes), add a sentence somewhere in there like “I’ve been addiing a lot of <b>free recipes</b> to the site lately (and link the full URL to your free recipes page like cooking healthy dot com slash free recipes
7. Comment on other food blogs, and use “Free Recipes” as your name and the URL to the free recipes page on your blog as the link
8. Comment in lots of forums, and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page
9. Submit every single recipe you wrote (with the first paragraph of text change a bit) to an article directory and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page as the signature / byline / footer, etc.
10. Post additional free recipes at least 1-2 times per month for 6-12 months for outstanding results!

The 10 step process I outlined is nothing more than basic SEO and linkbuilding. Notice in the intro sentence of the blog I put the keyword phrase in bold tags. This is an old SEO trick (that may not work as well anymore). You could use this process with any web site or blog, but my version assumes a few things.

Assumptions:

* You’re using blogging software, such as Wordpress, Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Geeklog, Xoops, etc.
* You have an SEO plugin installed that automatically uses the first xx words in a post as your meta description (like All in one SEO pack)
* You’re using a “related posts” plugin
* You know how to do linkbuilding
* You know how to do article marketing

Ranking well for keywords is like cooking a good pot of soup. The individual ingredients aren’t nearly as good until you put them all together. And over time the longer you let them cook in the pot – the better the blend together and taste! Also, as I mentioned earlier – doing this with a domain that has at least 100 posts and good indexing (and some kind of pagerank) will yield the best results.

John Pratt writes how-to articles and tutorials for bloggers striving to build monthly income online. Read his blog: JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes

SEODigger.com is an SEO tool that helps you find out what keywords a domain ranks for in google top 20 listings. I ran my URL and came up for keyword phrases I didn’t even know I ranked for. They have both a premium and free services available once you signup for an account – but I’m just using the free service for now. Check it out! You can get a quick and dirty look at where your blog stands in SERP’s, and maybe find out some new keyword phrases to key in on for monetization!

The ABC of SEO: Search Engine Optimization Strategies
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