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.

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 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!

Backlinks Watch is a great place to do SEO work, because it not only checks your backlinks, but it “digs” some info out about each and every one including anchor text, pagerank, and whether it’s ‘nofollow’ or ‘dofollow’. The site is free, and there are all kinds of software products on the market for several hundred dollars that basically do the same thing.

If you’re looking to find out who is linking your site, and what kind of quality those links are – this is a great way to Git ‘R Done!

Thanks to Smashing Magazine, today I learned of the Wordpress or WP SEO plugin that can and will replace just about every other SEO plugin you may already have installed. I can tell you, since I installed it – I have deleted both “Optimal Title” and “HEAD Meta Description” wordpress plugins, as well as ““. As mentioned in the Smashing Magazine post – I think that this plugin is still relatively unknown to most people, I first heard about it today. Let me point out the reasons that this WP SEO plugin is so valuable:

Not only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for Wordpress I’ve ever seen – but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”. I had never seen this robots “noodp” tag before, so I googled it and came up with this page on How do I change my site’s title and description. Basically in a nutshell, the googlebot (when it indexes your pages) uses an automated algorithm to create the title and descriptions that will be seen by web surfers doing searches and getting the search engine result pages (SERP’s). The googlebot takes into account the content of a page and references to it on the web. To prevent search engines from automatically doing this – and force them to use your html title and description tags, you need to use the robots noodp tag in your pages (which this WP plugin will automatically do).

Now that I’ve enabled this plugin and setup the options I wanted, the next time the googlebot comes around to this site – it should dramatically change the way Search Optimization School web pages are indexed, and hopefully we get some much better rankings for quite a few. If you have comments about this plugin, or ways that you’ve dramatically enhanced your SEO in Wordpress – leave them now below!

On my personal blogging site JTPRATT’s Blogging Mistakes, I just wrote a post about setting up 301 redirects. If you don’t already know how to setup 301 directs, what they are, or how to use them – you should read that article. I never really had to think about them before, but I recently moved one of my sites from Drupal to Wordpress, and I didn’t want to lose the page rank or link juice on a lot of my older articles. I had heard about redirects before, but had no idea how to set them up. After a little research I figured out what I believe to be the easiest way to do them…read the article to learn more!

I haven’t written a lot the last couple of months on this blog, but it turns out I should’ve been, since I’ve learned a lot about link building lately. The single most important thing you need to do to drive traffic to your blog or web site is building links, er, rather – quality links. First, let’s talk about ‘bad links’. Are you doing harm to your blog? Are you linking to things that can hurt your web site’s reputation? Maybe you are and you don’t even know about it. I encourage you to use a tool I found, the bad neighborhood link checker. I’ve also placed the link in the SEO Tools portion of the sidebar. Run your URL through this tool and see what you come up with. You may be surprised at what you find – I sure was. It made me remove some links, do a bunch of no-follow’s (for affillate links), and even think about what kinds of links I should be adding.

Now that you see where your site stands, you can more clearly think about building quality links to your site.

Top Ways to Build Quality Links to your web site

I’ve read just ungodly amounts of information lately on building links and these are the things that stick out in my mind as most important:

• Write Pillar Articles: This is something that I’d been doing and didn’t even know it. A pillar article is a page or post that you write that is very informative, and may take some time to research and write (but it will be worth it). You want to write about something that you either know a lot about, or can get a lot of information about. It can be based on opinion, personal experience, research on the web, viewing media (print or televised), interviews, statistical data, or a combination. A pillar article will contain information that you think a lot of people need, and that you either can’t currently find on the web, or the info is scattered about – and a page ’rounding everything up’ (I call these ’roundup’ pages) would be well visited. You might even want to do some keyword research to find out what best attract people to the article before you write it. Do some planning before you write a single word. Find out who your competition would be. And most importantly, make sure that your post is completely relevant to your web site’s current content and viewers.

  Now it’s time to write. Organize your article in logical sections, and plan out the headers of each section. Make sure any links you give are appropriate and will help your web site reputation – else ‘nofollow’ them. If you add any affiliate links, be sure to nofollow them as well. Be direct and informative and give as much information as possible. If you article is too lengthy, consider making it a series (Part I, Part II, Part III), or at least breaking it up into multiple pages. I’ll give you an example of one of the first pillar articles I ever wrote. I had obtained a new cell phone (about a year ago), and it was supposed to do everything except slice bread. It was an mp3 player, a modem for my laptop, it played video, it took flash memory cards, and on and on and on. When I was trying to figure out the best ways to store media on it, how to setup the modem part, and how to make my own ringtones and backgrounds the manual that came with it was obviously not the best way to learn. I did however find tons of useful tips and tricks in user-based cell phone forums. I like the phone so much, that I decided to write a page about it on one of my web sites and review it. After the review, I posted all the tips and tricks that I could find specific to that model phone. Last, I added in affiliate links to phone accessories with a little info about each one (especially the ones that I personally purchased).

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had written what would become my first ‘pillar aritlce’! Why? Because it became one of the top 5 visited pages of all time on my web site! It drove people to create bookmarks, and visit other sections of my site. That page got it’s own google pagerank (5), and increased the PR of my homepage and reputation of my site overall. Writing pillar articles is work, and definitely completely different than a 5-10 minute blog post. But they are worth the effort, and every web site should have some. Maybe your pillar articles could be the homepages of different sections of the site? Oh, one last thing about pillar pages. If you have the ability, make sure you have comments turned on, because the more frequently it’s updated and the more it grows – the more important it become to you! Hopefully whatever tool you use to publish your site has a good mechanism to control comment spam, because if you get a lot, it will completely diminish all the hard work you’ve done.

• List your site in quality directories: There are tons of “me too” directories you can list your web site in, but focus on the ones that are reputable and that have great page rank. They will do you the most good. Again – it’s all about reputation online. I read a post on dailyblogtips.com about “5 Effective ways to build links to your blog, and it really got me thinking. He had some great links (to directories to submit to), and even better advice. Give it a read, and pay attention when your surfing online to the chiclets on other blogs and who they’re listing (and linking back) to. More reputable sites will probably be linking back to more reputable directories. I like the link in daily blog tips to the “blog carnival” site. This is a site where you basically “author” a roundup type page on a particular subject. Another site like this is squidoo. It’s a trade-off really, but a good one. You author the page on a subject your familiar with (and have web pages about), and you provide the site and it’s users with some great content. But, in the process – you are linking back (hopefully) to your pillar pages that fit the mold of that subject. Find quality directories and ’roundup’ sites to submit (and write about) your content – it’s worth the time!
• Article Directories: I’ll be honest, I don’t have much personal experience with this one. Back in 98-99 I used to write articles for a few of these sites, but not to drive traffic to my site. It was because it was fun, and they paid me $5-$10 per page. It was good for a little extra spending money. Nowadays – google is trying really hard to remove all the garbage content to display only original and relevant content as often as possible. That means the old article directories that went out of vogue in 2000-2001 are suddenly a diamond in the rough. If you write original content and submit it to these article directories, you are instantly building links back to your site (usually at the end or in the bio). I’ve read a lot on this subject, and I’ll definitely be writing some content to submit myself. My only words of caution would be – make sure you do your homework and submit to the article directories with the best reputation (and pagerank) you can find. Be sure to only submit to the select few you find that are the best (don’t spam your article into every single site you can find, or use article submission software). Also, use the same guidelines for writing I used above for ‘pillar articles’. If I have good (or bad) luck with article directories and submission – I’ll be sure to write it up in a future post.

There are tons of ways to build quality links to your site and many I left off in this short list. I wanted to concentrate on three big ones for you to try, and honestly you can spend a great deal of time with only the few tips I gave. As always, please, if you have relevant comments, questions, or quality link-building practices you’d like to share – please comment now by using the form below!