StayOnSearch » SEO

4 Common SEO Copywriting Techniques That Ruin Your Copy

Eric Brantner — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:00:43 +0000

As an SEO copywriter, I work with a number of SEO companies providing copy for their clients. Many times, the SEO companies have certain guidelines they want me to follow when writing the copy. Some of these guidelines are based off proven SEO practices. Others are based on long outdated SEO techniques, and some are based on pure, unadulterated myths.

1. Word counts—It used to be believed that content had to reach a certain minimum word count for it to be indexed and ranked properly by the search engines. Some say the minimum magic word count in 400 words, and others claim it’s 250 words. Me? I say the concept is completely bogus. Don’t believe me? Just search for any term on Google, and look at the top pages in the results. Chances are, the word counts across these pages vary greatly—from just a few words to several hundred words.

The point? Don’t write to a word count. You’ll end up with a lot of filler content, and instead of paying attention to creating captivating, results-driven content, you end up with just words. Write until it’s just right.

2. Keyword density—File this under the “SEO Myth” category. People used to believe (and some really out of touch SEOs still do) that if you could achieve a certain keyword density, your website would magically jump up the search rankings. Again, it’s a bogus concept that you can easily disprove by doing some searching on your own. There is no magic keyword density. And when you try to write copy only with keywords in mind, you end up with stiff, robotic copy that doesn’t convert visitors. Want to rank well? Write great content that attracts quality links.

3. Keyword headlines—Yes, it’s a good idea to put keywords in your headlines/H1 tags. But the intrigue and clarity of your headline is far more important than its keyword-richness. Remember, the headline is the first thing a new visitor to your website sees. If it doesn’t grab their attention and force them to keep reading, they’ll abandon your website.

4. Heavy internal linking—When done properly, internal linking within your copy can help Google better classify the pages on your site and it can drive visitors forward toward conversion. However, if you take internal linking overboard, it becomes a distraction. It can easily overwhelm readers, giving them too many options. When that happens, they usually choose none and back out.

Do you use any of these techniques when writing your SEO copy? Do you think they’re holding your copy back? Share your experiences in the replies.

How to Use PPC to Complement SEO

Mark Thompson — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:00:17 +0000

Recently I wrote a blog post on How SEO and Social Media Are Joining Forces, so I thought it would be beneficial to show how PPC can help to compliment SEO. Now that Pay-Per-Click (at least in Google) is becoming so saturated with advertisers, compared to 5-7 years ago, that you need to be smart with your PPC spend. Clicks that use to be $0.85 are now $3.30, clicks that use to be $3.30 are now $6.75 and there is no sign of it stopping. Unlike in 2003, you need to be clever and create a unique strategy as to how you are going to spend your paid search budget.

It is proven that when you use an integrated marketing approach with both Pay-Per-Click and Search Engine Optimization that you will see an increase in Clicks, Actions, Orders/Sales, Page Views, Visitors, and Time on Site. With that being said, if you can gain visibility in the organic, local business, and paid listings you are guaranteed to see better results!

Here are some ways that I have found to be very effective when integrated Pay-Per-Click to compliment Search Engine Optimization.

Finding Gaps in Your Organic Visibility

Like most companies, I’m sure you would love to rank organically for ALL of the keywords/phrases that are relevant to your industry. However in reality that is not going to happen without a lot of hard work and time. While you are building your SEO efforts for certain keywords, start to build an initial presence by bidding on those terms. As you start to creep onto the 1st page organically, you can begin to remove those keywords from your Adwords account. Once you are gaining good organic traffic you could either save that PPC ad spend or do the same thing with another sub-set of keywords.

The higher level idea is to supplement your SEO efforts with PPC, while you are in the process of building links and content for the specific keywords/phrases you want to rank for.

Finding the Money Keywords

Hopefully you have installed conversion tracking on your website so you can see which keywords are leading to conversions. If you notice that a set of keywords are leading to a positive ROI and are targeted to searches with buyers intent, you may want to try and gain organic and paid visibility. This way you can have more real estate in the SERPs for keywords that pay.

The Detecting Online Commercial Intent tool in the MSN adCenter Labs is a great tool for this.

Bidding on Competitors Names

Odds are you are not going to be able to rank organically for your competitors brand names. Typically when you search a company’s name in Google you are going to find their main website, blog, local business profile and social media profiles as the top results. However one way you can gain some visibility is by purchasing their brand or product name as a keyword in Adwords. Now sometimes Google will not allow you to bid on certain terms if they are trademarked, but it is worth it to add it to your Adwords account and see if it gets approved. Personally, I think of this as somewhat of a shady tactic, however I can see how this is just one form of guerrilla marketing that can be very effective.

What Google Says:

Advertisers are responsible for the keywords that they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.
Google takes allegations of trademark infringement very seriously and, as a courtesy, we investigate matters raised by trademark owners. Trademarks are territorial and apply only to certain goods or services. Therefore, different parties can own the same mark in different countries or different industries. Accordingly, in processing complaints, Google will ask the trademark owner for information regarding where the mark is valid and for what goods or services. Please note the following about our complaint process:
The trademark owner doesn’t need to be a Google AdWords advertiser in order to send a complaint.
Any such investigation will only affect ads served on or by Google.
Google’s trademark policy does not apply to search results. Our investigations only apply to sponsored links. For trademark concerns about websites that appear in Google search results, the trademark owner should contact the site owner directly.
In the case of an AdSense for Domains trademark complaint, an investigation will affect only the participation of the domain name in question in our AdSense for Domains programme.
Because Google is not a third-party arbiter, we encourage trademark owners to resolve their disputes directly with the advertisers, particularly because the advertisers may have similar ads running via other advertising programmes.

Creating Ad Copy for Low CTR

A great aspect to PPC advertising is you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. A strategy you can implement is create ad copy that is meant for the user to not want to click on the ad. Usually generic ads that don’t have a clear offer or call to action will help to reduce the click-through rate. In order for this to be effective, you need to have rankings in the organic listings with a compelling description so that the user will see both listings and want to click your natural listing instead. You can still try this strategy without having organic rankings, however it will be more of a branding strategy.

Increase Conversions with this Pre-Launch Product Checklist

Mark Thompson — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:15:46 +0000

When you create a new product that you plan on launching on your website or blog, it takes more than just a good product idea for it to be successful. It needs to be marketed properly to your target audience. A few things I learned from when I released the Link Builder’s Toolkit, was the pre-launch marketing execution can be as time consuming as the actual product creation. However if the pre-launch is done correctly it can significantly increase your sales.

Pre-launch Product Checklist

1. Lead Generation Setup

Hopefully you already have a nice in-house marketing list that you can leverage to reach out to your readers about your new product. If not, you should start right away. The more e-mail addresses you can collect, the better chance you have for more exposure and sales.

Freebies - Start by offering a piece of content for free, in exchange for their e-mail address. Giving away the 1st chapter of your eBook, a video interview you did, a podcast or a whitepaper are great incentives for gathering e-mail addresses.
Giveaway Sign-Up - Give an incentive that if they sign-up they will be entered into a drawing to win your product for free.
Optimized Contact Form - Make sure the lead gen form is simple and easy to fill out, with minimal information needed from the user.

2. Reaching Out to Industry Influencers

Give Your Product to 5-10 Industry Influencers - By doing this you can leverage their readership and traffic to try and create some buzz about your product. Try asking them to write a review about the product or maybe ask them to conduct an interview on you, that they can then use on their blog.
Ask to Guest Blog - Reach to reputable blogs to see if you could write a guest post that covers topics related to your product. Then add a soft sell in your author bio about the new product launch.
Gain Feedback - While you are still putting the finishing touches to your product, it is important to get some feedback from other in the industry. Doing a focus group or reaching out to the people who you gave your product to gain some feedback on how it be improved.

3. Affiliate Area

Create a Page - If you choose to offer an Affiliate Program where people can earn commission for marketing/selling your products, you should have a section on your site that speaks directly to them.
Create Marketing Materials - Provide your affiliate with all the necessary materials they will need to market your product. Include banner ads (various sizes), training materials, sales letters, incentives, coupon codes, etc…
Create Incentives - Starting a contest or offering incentives for your affiliates will give them a reason to heavily promote your product and entice them to want to make your product more, over others.

4. Landing Page Creation

Create a Landing Page or Micro-site – Depending on the quality and value of the product you will want to have a central place where you drive readers to. If you are selling something at a low price like an Ebook, it would probably make sense to have a landing page on your current domain. However if your product is more complex like a Training Course or login area with premium content, you may want to create a new domain that matches the name of your product.
Add Promo Graphics - Make sure that you have multiple spots on your site where you can help promote the product. Usually in the sidebar, at the bottom of a blog post and at the end of an RSS feed are great places to add a promo graphic about your new product.
Include Conversion Best Practices – Make sure that your landing page is using all the best practices to increase your conversion rates including capturing headlines, feature/benefit statements, special pricing, optimized checkout process, money-back guarantee, testimonials, etc…

5. E-Mail Newsletter Creation

Auto-responders – Have a series of auto-responders for anyone who signs up to be informed when the product launches. Include various content that talk about what’s included in the product, how its going to help you, and timely offers if they act right away.
Branded Template – This is not mandatory but it would be nice to have a newsletter template that has the same look and feel of your website. This will help improve branding and associate your logo/colors with the product.

6. Create Social Buzz

Post Updates to Your Social Profiles – Post updates on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin about anything newsworthy that relates to the product launch.
Monitor Keyword Mentionings – Reach out to people who are discussing similar products and topics. Create a strategy that engages with these people and makes them aware of your upcoming product launch. Offer these people a discount or reason to fill out a form so that you can follow up with them when the product launches.

The Importance of Building a Natural Link Profile

Roko Nastic — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:00:09 +0000

Link building is essential to any website that wants to climb the search engine rankings and stay there. What a lot of people fail to understand is that this is not as simple as finding as many links as you can, no matter where from, and then adding them all in one go. If a website is to be consistently successful in the search engines, it has to possess a natural link profile.

What Is a Natural Link Profile?

A good link-building strategy should appear natural, and not forced or manipulated. Ideally, the search engines are looking for a steady collection of relevant links from good quality sites, over a period of time. The links should be from a variety of sources.

A natural link profile is one that does not ring any search engine alarm bells. There are many things a web owner can do, when creating links, that will cause the links to look unnatural and suspicious. Unfortunately, there are many guides and uninformed advices that will advise of certain link-building methods that can alert a search engine that something is afoot.

How to Keep the Search Engines Happy

Keep the following guidelines in mind if you wish to keep search engines on your side:

Link Velocity – Do not add 100 links in 2 days then none for a month, before beginning another mad burst of link-building. Sporadic linking can look like you are link spamming, search engines look for consistency and continuity.
IP Diversity – Having 20 links all coming from a variety of small blogs or hub pages you have created may satisfy the criteria for having links from different sites, but it will not fool the search engines. All these links come from sites with the same IP address and suggest that you are falsely manufacturing links. Get backlinks from a variety of sites with different IP addresses.
There is a significant number of SEO experts who believe that you should mix “NoFollow” and “DoFollow” links in your link building efforts. Some of them even go so far stating that 10-20% of your links should be from “NoFollow” sources to appear natural. There is no strong evidence for this, but is something worth keeping in mind.
Link Popularity – Search engines place greater importance on links from trusted sources and authority sites. Google has its PageRank system but the other search engines also look for high-quality links. The more quality links you have, the better you will rank. A larger amount of low-quality reciprocal links, or off-topic links, may suggest you are blog spamming or using a link farm/exchange.
Topical Relevance – Keep your content fresh and updated and a steady flow of links coming in to your site. Search engines are looking for sites that provide up-to-date information and relevance. If you keep your content on-topic and have good links gradually pointing to your site, the search engines will start to regard you as an authority over time.

Keep the Search Engines on Your Side

Of course link-building is unnatural. Unless you are Google, Facebook or Wikipedia you will have to go looking for your own links. In a perfect online world no one would have to ask for a link, everyone would be linking to other sites naturally purely for the interest of pointing out new, informative content for searchers. The internet is not perfect and if you are not one of the “giants” you will have to beg, steal and borrow links.

Nearly everyone is in the same boat, but the person that shines in the eyes of the search engines is the one who can make this unnatural link creation appear totally innocent. Try to maintain a natural link profile and the search engines will eventually reward you.

How Professional SEOs Get Inbound Links

Ryan Beale — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:00:09 +0000

Getting found on Google consists of 2 things: 1) content and 2) links. Since inbound links act as a voting system or currency for search engine algorithms, it’s imperative that SEOs acquire high quality inbound links on a consistent basis. One way to produce inbound links is to create an educational infographic for bloggers to use in their articles.

Aaron Wall’s PPC Blog had an awesome infographic on “How Google Works” today and I felt the need to share this as an example of how Professional SEO’s get quality inbound links. The picture above clearly describes How Google works to the average Googler who may be interested learning more about the powerful search engine.

(Click to Enlarge)

How Do Professional SEOs Get Inbound Links?

Create Quality Content - First and foremost, you need to create quality content for the searchers online. You can reference Google’s webmaster guidelines about what quality content is.
Create Relevant Content -The “How Google Works” Infographic is relevant to the PPC Blog which is powered by the owner of SEOBook.com, Aaron Wall.
Education - Aaron doe s a great job of Informing the average searcher on Google on How Google Works in a creative way. Education and creativity are a recipe for link building success.
Make it EASY to get the link – Provide The Code For the Inbound Link – You will notice the code below the picture which allows bloggers like myself use this quality infographic on my website, which automatically links back to the origin of the infographic/file.

Want to build links like the pros? Start creating compelling, relevant, educational content in a creative way and make it super easy for bloggers to link to your content.

5 Important Elements of a Sales Landing Page

Mark Thompson — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:00:44 +0000

Every great sales or lead generation landing page have certain similar characteristics to them. Those characteristics lead to increases in sales, leads and overall conversion rates.

Let’s take a look at the different elements of a successful landing page.

1. Enticing Offer

No matter how nice of a landing page you create, if your offer sucks, nobody will want to download/buy your product. Make sure the offer says how it is a solution for the pain or problem your target audience has. In the example below, this affiliate blogging e-book is geared towards bloggers and affiliate marketers who want to learn how to make money by blogging about affiliate products. The particular goal of this page is to gather e-mail addresses, to then sell other products in the future.

2. Bulleted List of Features/Benefits

When a visitor comes to your landing page, you have only a few seconds to capture their attention. Usually once the reader sees your main headline, they will decide to keep reading or to leave. If they decide to keep reading, you need to keep them interested by offering some features and benefits of what they product with offer them. By using bullet points or a numbered list, it makes it easier to read and will draw the eye of the reader.

3. Tangible Product Graphic

Specific to selling virtual products, you need to try to paint a picture to the buyer as to what is it they are buying. Sometimes that can be hard since it’s not something they can touch. That is why creating a graphic that represents a tangible product can help make it more real. In the image below, this is a great example of an e-book that gives the buyer a sense of tangibility to the product.

4. Appealing “Download/Buy Now” button

Sometimes just running an A/B test on your button can increase your conversion rate by 50%. Make sure it is prominent and is draws the readers eye to the area.

5. Quick Lead Gen Form

Don’t make the reader have to fill out a long form, just to download/purchase a product. Make it as quick and painless as possible, adding only the MOST important fields. If all you are trying to do is gather the users e-mail address, just have one field for them to enter. If they are purchasing a product, try to integrate Paypal or Google Checkout to expedite the checkout process.

Use a call to action directly above or next to the area where they are going to enter their information. This will give them another reason to give you their information.

6. Bonus: Video Introduction**

Personally I don’t think you necessarily need to have a video introduction about your product, but it definitely can help. Giving your reader another way to connect with the website or person selling the product, makes them feel more comfortable moving forward with giving their information or purchasing the product.

Promoting Article Marketing with RSS Feeds

Kristi Hines — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:00:55 +0000

Many people think of article marketing as simply a way to build a backlink or traffic to their website, to build their reputation as an expert, or to make money online via article writing. But not many think about their articles as promotional items and actually promoting them.

Benefits of Article Promotion

By going beyond simply writing and posting articles and actually promoting them, you will help your articles move up in search engine results and gain more traffic, resulting in the following:

Higher PageRank (based on incoming links).
Better ratings on each article
Increased clicks on your website link
Recognition of the author as an expert in their niche or industry.
Additional earnings on sites that give authors revenue sharing options based on the number of views each article receives or the number of ads that are clicked while readers are on your article.

So no matter what your motivation for article writing and article marketing, you will certainly want to promote your articles. One way to do this is by utilizing a feature that most article marketing networks provide for each author – the author’s individual article RSS feed.

Getting an Author’s RSS Feed

Let’s start with how to find the author RSS feed (or if a RSS feed is offered) on different article directories.

Author’s Profile Page

Take a look at the author profile page, which can be found by simply clicking on the author’s name in an article. This page will usually have an RSS icon or “subscribe to this author” link. If it does not show up here, but the author profile page shows a link to view all articles by this author, then the RSS icon or link might be on that page instead.

Article sites that have easy to find author RSS feeds include EzineArticles, ArticleBase, Suite 101, Helium, GoArticles, Article Alley, Idea Marketers, Bukisa, HubPages, and many, many more.

Firefox Navigation Bar

If that fails, and you are in Firefox, while you are on the author page or on the page with a list of articles by that author, look at the navigation bar and see if the RSS icon is available.

Firefox Navigation Bar RSS Feed Icon

When you click on it, it should take you to the feed – if the items are all by that author, then this is the feed link you want. Article Snatch is one example where you have to go to the author’s page, click Browse My Articles, and then use the Firefox navigation bar’s RSS icon to subscribe.

Custom Feed Creation

Some article networks require you to go through more of a process to find or create an author feed. In Squidoo you have to export your lensmaster RSS feed using the SquidUtils. In eHow, you have to extract the RSS feed from the featured articles widget, and that will only allow you the 5 eHow articles you have marked as featured.

If you can’t find the feed easily, simply Google something to the effect of author RSS feed on ____ network (be sure to replace author with lensmaster or any other custom name the network has for it’s authors). If it can be created, someone has written a guide for it.

Utilizing RSS Feeds for Article Promotion

Now that you (hopefully) have a specific author’s RSS feed, here are some ways you can go about using it for promoting your articles.

1. RSS Submissions

Bloggers are always encouraged to submit their blog feed to RSS submission sites as a way to get deep links to your posts as well as traffic, and authors at article directories can do the same.

Assuming you don’t go with a submission service and want to do this manually, it would be best to start with the highest quality RSS submission sites, which can be found sorted by PageRank and Alexa in the Link Builder’s Toolkit. After you hit the best and you want to keep going for more, try this RSS submission compilation which lists over 250 RSS submission sites with a short description and direct link to the submission page if different from the homepage. It is also updated very often, but not in any particular order based on site authority or popularity.

2. Feedburner

Curious how many people subscribe to your articles on a particular network? If you have a blog or other way of enticing readers to subscribe to your articles, you can always burn a custom Feedburner URL for your articles, giving you the ability to see stats for how many subscribers are there, and even enable email subscriptions, just like you can with blogs.

One idea, if you are not already using the maximum number of links allowed at the end of your articles or in your author box, would be to include a link to your RSS feed so that if someone likes one of your articles, they can easily subscribe right from there, hopefully giving your articles loyal readers.

3. Blog Commenting with CommentLuv

CommentLuv enabled blogs allow commenters to leave a link to their website as well as a link to their latest blog post. The same system can be used with article directories that offer RSS feeds for authors. You simply have to register your author RSS feed with ComLuv (free for the first feed / article account) to have access to your latest 10 posts in the dropdown below the comment form.

CommentLuv Dropdown Post Listings

Since I have my blog and several article networks registered under one account, the latest posts and articles are all available for me to comment with so I can use the most relevant one, which will encourage additional clicks. Learn more about promoting your article marketing strategy using CommentLuv.

4. Subscribe and Share on Google Reader

Speaking of subscribing to feeds, I always subscribe to my own feeds for two reasons. One, to make sure everything looks ok in RSS, as some fun scripts can create havoc in an RSS item. Two, if you have people who subscribe to your reader’s shared items, you can go in and share your articles using the Share option at the bottom of the feed item.

Google Reader Shared Items

I don’t know exactly how many people actually visit shared items, but if you connect your Google Reader to your Google Buzz account, it will Buzz your shared items to your followers there for added exposure.

5. Social Media Syndication

You can add your article RSS feed to any social site or application that allows you to syndicate an RSS feed to your social media profile. These are not limited to but include:

FriendFeed – allows you to add RSS feeds as blog items.
TwitterFeed – posts new RSS feed items to Twitter and/or Facebook.
HootSuite – posts new RSS feed items to any accounts linked to your HootSuite including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, and PingFM.
Forums – certain ones allow you to enter a feed on your forum profile and it will put your latest post (or article) at the top of each post you make.

The possibilities are endless – if you don’t have a blog and have a social or forum profile that allows you to enter a feed – use it with your best article network RSS!

Compile Feeds with Yahoo Pipes

Do you want all of your articles in one feed? You can use Yahoo Pipes to compile all of your individual feeds into one. Simply login to your Yahoo account and create a new pipe.

Use the Feed Fetch modules under Sources for each of your Feed URLs. Combine these to the Union modules under Operators. Then connect the Union modules to the Sort module under Operators to sort the feeds by date. Finally, connect the Sort module to the Pipe Output module (which is usually added to new pipes automatically) and Save it.

Yahoo Pipes RSS Feed Compilation

It will save and give you an option at the top to run the pipe. When you run it, it will give you the option to publish it publicly so others can find it and use / share it, and you can also grab an RSS feed based on the output of the pipe, which will be a feed compilation of all of the feeds piped compiled together.

As a side note, I just started using pipes, and I’m not fully sure if it will automatically updated every time you add a new article or if you have to go and run the pipe to update the feed. I’m also not sure if this is the best way to do this, so if an experienced Pipe user would like to add some feedback, it would be welcome.

Your Article Promotion Methods via RSS

Do you utilize any of these methods of article promotion via RSS feeds, or ones that weren’t mentioned? Have you seen results? Let’s discuss in the comments! And be sure to share this with your article marketing colleagues so the can get the most out of article marketing promotion with RSS feeds as well!

Why More Traffic Doesn’t Always Mean More Sales

Alan Mater — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:00:41 +0000

If you have visited as many blogs as I have over the last few years, or if you are relatively new to Internet Marketing, you will probably have read many articles that totally distort the truth. One of the best I’ve seen goes something like this: “If your website suffers from no traffic and needs more leads and sales, the best solution to this problem is to increase the traffic.”

All That Glitters is Not Gold

In the context of this post, they would have you believe that getting more traffic to your website means making more sales. The problem with this ideology is that it just isn’t true. Far from it! What if your visitors are just window shoppers? What if they don’t care what your website is offering, no matter how enticing you think your products are? Well it all boils down to just one thing: you are getting traffic but not targeted traffic. It’s as simple as that.

Why Getting High Traffic is Not Enough

While it may sound nice to know you have a good amount of traffic arriving at your website, the truth is that traffic that does not convert to sales is quite useless. Like someone who has good money to spend on PPC could easily bring in an absurd amount of traffic. But, if there is no conversion, this traffic becomes worthless. For sales to actually take place, you must have good conversions.

How Do You Increase Sales Conversions?

As there is no face-to-face dealing, the challenge is to provide an unforgettable customer experience that is special, satisfying and the right information he/she is looking for.

If your product provides a solution to a problem, include this benefit in your content.
You should offer whatever help to make your visitors understand your product better and how to use it. If this means providing a video to help explain things a little better, get it done immediately.
Put up a personal message on your website, even if it is just a simple message to welcome your visitors.
Put up some of your customers’ testimonials on your website to show confidence of the product from people who have used it.
Provide your “call to action” like a link to purchase and download your product. All the earlier steps culminate in this last step, so make sure that this call to action is prominently displayed on your website.

Quick Tricks to Checking Your Backlinks

Eric Gesinski — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:00:08 +0000

When you’re working on SEO and building quality backlinks, anyone who does it actively wants to know how effective each link is and how well it’s doing. Well, there are some specific methods to check on the quality of your links, when they’re crawled, and more, so you can know details about each of your backlinks.

Knowing When It’s Crawled

So you got a great PR6 backlink, but you can’t wait until it’s actually indexed so you can start getting some of that link juice love back to your site. How do you know when it’s been crawled? With Google, there are a few ways:

Check the cache – This is the easy way, most people are aware of this. Simply query keywords that match the page you are waiting for to be updated. When the page shows in the listings, click on the “Cached” link next to the URL in the SERP. This will show the page that is the most recent copy that has been crawled, as well as displaying a date/time on when that cache was made.
Search the URL – You may not always have a specific query to find the page you want to locate to check for your update. However, if you know the URL for the page you want to check, there’s a definite way. To query it for sure, you can put in the URL into the following query string in Google: “site:sampleurl.com/directory” This will search for that specific page and show listings for only matching URLs. Then you can see if that page has been crawled and then check the cache to see how recently the last crawl was.
Search the URL with keywords – This is just a variation on doing the “site:” search. You can add a keyword phrase after the domain/URL to see if any matching pages have been crawled. If your link is part of specific content you know unique keywords for or if you have specific anchor text you placed, you can put this as your keyword phrase. If it’s been crawled, it will come up in the results, and you know your link is active.

Checking the Quality of Backlink

How good is your backlink? You can check the PageRank for that page, but PR is a value that’s not truly shown, we only see the “Toolbar PageRank” value, and this is only updated five times each year. If the primary domain is established and has a decent PR, that’s promising. But there’s another way to check how good your link is.

One key factor to determine the quality of backlinking is the level in which the links get seen and shared. How often is the content distributed? Is it only the single link? Is it copied? This is especially important if you’re doing article marketing of any kind.

One easy way to do this is by using Google Alerts. Find a unique keyword phrase for your content – the title, if it’s an article. Then put it into quotes and set an alert using Google Alerts. This will show every time Google crawls a new instance of that unique keyword phrase. You’ll see how many times the content is distributed or shared, and can check to see how many of these are providing additional links for you. It can be used for research to find out the best ways to get good backlinks.

Using these methods to check on the quality of your backlinks can help you find good places to continue building links for your SEO. Doing this type of research can improve your SEO results substantially, when done well.

8 Greyhat Tactics SEOs Are Using, Use at Your Own Discretion!

Mark Thompson — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:45:11 +0000

Throughout my 5 years as a SEO and Internet Marketer, I have seen a number of tactics that were borderline unethical (depending on who you talk to in the industry). Even though people won’t admit it, SEO’s are using some or all of the tactics I am going to mention. I am not saying that I personally condone these tactics or that I even use any of them, but whether you like it or not, people are doing these greyhat tactics.

It should also be said that Google and the other social media sites have gotten much better at being able to detect these tactics and while I don’t promote using these tactics, use at your own discretion.

Paid Links

Probably the most obviously and heavily discussed topic would be people who pay for inbound links to their site. Rand for SEOmoz did a great test, showing the results from a paid link campaign he ran with three different sites. His results showed how buying links from an authoritative website with keyword rich anchor text, increased their organic rankings. Of course, they did this simply for testing purposes, but we would be naive to think that SEOs are not using this tactic to increase their organic rankings.

Watch the entire video that explains the entire test they ran.

Automated Twitter Accounts

Have you ever noticed the people with 50,000 twitter followers, except they only have 300 tweets? How do you think they are getting all of those followers? Usually its with some automated Twitter software like Tweet Adder.

Of course there are ways to target your Twitter followers by finding people with relevant profiles, but mass adding people can be considered unethical.

Automated Facebook Fans

Similar to mass adding Twitter followers, you can do the same with Facebook, by using software like Facebook Blaster Pro. Basically this will start sending mass friend requests in hopes of generating lots of friends that they can then send messages to and request them to be a fan.

Once they are your friend any messages you post on your Facebook profile will show up on their profile…helping to promote your updates and content.

Paying Social Bookmarking Power Users

Leveraging social bookmarking sites is a great way to drive additional traffic to your website or blog. However there are a number of ways that people manipulate these sites to push their content to the front pages. Especially with a site like Digg, some SEOs will pay what are called “power users” to help push their content. Typically power users have well established accounts and a large following that will help promote any content that power user diggs. If you pay a power user to digg you content, you can expect to see a few hundred diggs and a nice spike in traffic to your blog. As you can see how people would see this as unethical, others may think of this as just another way of advertising or marketing your content.

Unethical Link Exchanges

As we know reciprocal link exchanges are not very effective anymore, however there are ways around that. Back a few years ago at SMX West in Seattle, they had a session on greyhat tactics that you could use at your own risk. One of the presenters mentioned requesting a reciprocal link exchange and then adding a nofollow tag to the outbound link. This way the incoming link would be treated as a one-way inbound link.

Article Spinning/Submission

Another way Internet Marketers are tricking the search engines into thinking their content is 100% unique is by spinning the article. This is where you take an article and using software like Magic Article Rewriter you can modify the content by replacing words with synonyms and similar phases so that the article is different enough, where Google will see it as unique. They will do this a number of times so that they have lots of 300-450 word unique articles that can be submitted to article submission sites.

Taking this greyhat tactic a step further would be to use an automated article submission tool like Magic Article Submitter to automate the process of sending your articles to hundreds of article websites.

Stuffed Website Content for Search Engines

Have you ever seen a beautifully designed website, only to be ruined with tons of plain text below the fold. Usually this text is only there for the sake of search engines and can devalue to entire site. SEOs will fill this area with keyword-rich H1 tags, bold keyword throughout the body and add the phase a number of times, just to try and fool the search engines into ranking that site higher. Luckily Google is much better at catching this tactic, and many SEOs have gotten away at doing this.

Manipulating Sharing Statistics

For sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit it is a little bit harder to manipulate the results because of their more complex algorithms. However for smaller social bookmarking sites like Sphinn, WebMarkingBlips, and BizSugar it is easier to get your post to the front page. Many people will submit a post and reach out to other members and tell them to promote their post. People also create multiple accounts so that they can promote the post from all of their accounts, instead of just the one.

Getting on the 1st page of even the smaller social bookmarking sites can earn you hundreds of visitors to your site, so you can see why some SEOs will do what it takes to get to the front page. I myself am guilty of asking people to promote a post I really want to market, because I think it is worthy.

*** The example above is merely to show what a social bookmarking example would look like. The person and company that submitted this is in no way manipulating the results.

Paid Reviews

Services like PayPerPost and ReviewMe allow advertisers to submit paid reviews to bloggers who will write a review on their website or product on the bloggers site. In return the advertiser also gets a link back to their site with the anchor text of their choosing. Professional blogger John Chow has been called out for doing various product reviews on his site that he gets paid to write. Personally I do not see this as a greyhat or unethical practice…just another form of advertising. Why wouldn’t you leverage the traffic and credibility you have built to make money?