Building credible inbound links using article sites

http://www.articlebeach.comThrough my eBay shop I recently won a 12 hour piece of SEO work for an online classified ads site, foxads.co.uk, which has taken me into unchartered waters...

The challenge, as it hit me, is that the Foxads home page has no content to optimise. Because it is dominated by free classified ads which are user generated content (UGC),  I found it difficult to employ my tried and tested SEO model of optimising the static content on the main landing pages using my SEO 101 Techniques (see previous blog post "Taking the plunge into search engine optimization").

But running Foxads through the online web assessment tools at alexa.com and websitegrader.com gave me an insight that the Foxads site lacked inbound links.  But this wasn’t what my eBay listing was advertising:  I’m good at content optimisation but lacked experience in link building – my dilemma was whether to hand the money back in order to preserve my 100% A star feedback or dive into unchartered waters...

Over the last twelve months I’ve signed my own websites up to a couple of link exchange sites who do it all for you, but in truth, I don’t believe I achieved any tangible improvement in my page rank what so ever! I was pretty convinced that I’d received a slap in the face from Google for using automated link building services.

Article sites saved the day!  Through investigating where competitors have successfully created inbound links I have discovered the wonderful service that article sites provide:  You submit a bona fide information based article of between 250-400 words, and once it’s approved, voila!  You have created a valuable inbound link back to your site with a page rank of between 6 – 8.

The article sites I’ve discovered so far are at:-

 http://ezinearticles.com
 http://www.acmearticles.com
 http://www.articlecity.com
 http://www.articlesbase.com
 http://a1articles.com
 http://www.articleclick.com
 http://www.articlesphere.com
http://www.aardvarkarticles.net
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.1articleworld.com
http://www.articlebeach.com


Try them – they work.   In conclusion, my view is that there aren’t many short cuts worth taking when it comes to building link partnerships.  Which is why link building costs what it does.....

Optimising Your Online Potential

This is the presentation I gave at the Destination Staffordshire and Go Leicestershire annual tourism conferences in which I covered:
- Top tips to effective website design
- An introduction to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
- Web 2.0. TripAdvisor. YouTube.
- Pay per Click adverising (PPC); Google Adwords

Optimising Your Online Potential

View more presentations from steveprimecloud.

SEO 101. Taking the plunge into search engine optimisation

So once you've created a great looking website with good design, easy to use menus and built using the latest content management software this is not time to sit back, relax and be content with your work!! 

Your next challenge is to get your website noticed...  There is a lot of myth and legend surrounding the mysteries of search engine optimisation, but, actually, it's all pretty straight forward.  

Here are my top tips on getting the SEO basics right:

1.  Start by checking out your competitors!  Goto their websites, read their content, titles, headings and main text and assess how well they are getting their message out.

If you want to delve deeper, use the "View Source" menu item to look at the HTML of the webpages and jot down page titles, meta description and meta keywords that you will find listed in the top few lines .

2.  Then start thinking about content optimisation of your own site - write down your USPs (unique selling points) - and list the keywords and key phrases which appear most frequently in your list of USPs.

3.  Now here's the clever bit, run your keywords and keyphrases through Google's Keyword Tool and it will tell you how popular / good your key phrases are and will rank alternative suggestions for you to consider:

 4. Once you've identified your key phrases, then the next task is to embed these into your web page HTML.  If you are happy to do this yourself then repeat the key-phrases in titles, headings, text and behind images uses ALT tags.

 5.  and write the key phrases into your content using the guidelines listed in the slide. 

 If all this is a bit daunting, then now could be a good time to contact your web designer or seo consultant...  

6.  I also found the seo tools listed on the Build-Recipricol-Links website to be very useful in refining keyword density and checking your page rank.

SEO tends to be a very iterative process, so once you've got some results then go back and refine, refine and refine again:-)

There are also handy  tools to report on Page Rank and assess Link Popularity, but I'll write more on this my next post.

Please contact me if you would like a copy of the full powerpoint slides previewed in this article.

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• Optimising your online potential (slideshare.net)
• SEO: The Art of the Keyword. (e-commerce-marketing.suite101.com)