There is a lot more benefits a brand could gain once it has a continuous flow of traffic. But the methods on how to actually do it are more important than the theories.

In this post, I’ll share to you a few ways to improve your blog’s traffic that are scalable and could be performed in any type of niche you’re working in.

Let’s get started…

1. Target social influencers when promoting your content

You already know that it’s not enough to create a content that is tailored to your target audience. Content promotion is a must right after your crafted your content and should be done twice the effort and time you exerted in your content creation.

One of the key ways to amplify the reach of your content is to get in touch with social influencers who could be your brand followers and could make your content promotion easier than the usual tactic (given that they have existing followers who might be interested to read/consume your content).

Type in your industry in the Followerwonk’s search Twitter bio and sort the results by social authority. Social authority is not only based on the number of followers a person gains but also on how he actually engages with his social followers. The higher the social authority of the influencer, the higher is the person’s engagement with his followers.

You can also use CircleCount to look for influencers who are active on Google+. Why do you need Google+ industry influencers? Simply because Google is now favoring brands with engaging Google+ pages and posts that have high Google+ shares are more likely to rank higher on search results.

Type in your keyword/niche in CircleCount and you’ll be able to see influencers who have a lot of followers on Google+. Reach out to them and offer your content. Remember that you don’t need to be pushy in your outreach. Just give them a heads up of your content and they’ll be the one to decide whether or not your content deserves a share.

You can use this email template to reach out to social influencers:

And boom! You could give a boost to your content’s reach with just a few minutes of outreach.

2. Use commonly-searched keywords on your guest posts

As I have mentioned in my guest post on FindMyBlogWay, creating high quality content assets should be done inside and outside your blog. The more you provide good content assets on other sites, the more brand signals you’re sending to search engines. These brand signals could be acquired when people search for your brand-related terms (brand name, offerings, etc..). This actually happens if you could get people remember your brand by providing content that is unique, comprehensive and could be a good resource/reference for blog posts.

Given that the authority site where your will contribute your content have high domain rank, it becomes easy for the blog posts hosted on that site to rank for targeted keywords. The reason is that authority of the main page can be passed to its internal pages.

Take advantage of this by targeting easy-to-rank keywords on your guest posts. If your guest post ranks high on SERPs, it will receive continuous traffic depending on the search volume and seasonality of the keyword used. And the more visitors landed on that guest post, the chance of getting referred traffic through the site is higher.

Referred traffic doesn’t come automatically when visitors landed on your guest post. The content should entice users to visit your site by linking to your site’s deeper pages and adding a call to action to your guest post.

3. Use freshness for your content assets

Freshness had been released by Google to serve users with updated content pieces. This would help small brands to dominate the search results with updated and high quality content.

You can actually use freshness for your content to maximize its potential to rank on top spots of organic results given that it’s actually what the search engines and users are looking for in a content (fresh!).

To determine if your preferred keyword favors fresh content in the search results, type that keyword in Google search. And look at the publishing date of each of the post. Just by looking at the dates, you can already determine if freshness greatly impacts ranking results in your niche.

4. Automate alerts for unlinked/linked brand mentions

If you truly provide utility for your target audience, getting mentions from various web places is nearly possible for your brand. There are several reasons why webmasters would want to link to you. One reason would be the comprehensiveness of your content that it is deserved to be referenced by bloggers for their content.

Bloggers are not always perfect when they link to external sources. Some of them would just link to your homepage though it should be linked to your internal page(s). Others mentioned your brand name or your name but don’t actually linked to your site or even to your social profile.

These instances are common to every brand and you just have to monitor every mentions of your brand to get the most value of them.

Unlinked or linked brand mentions can be easily identified when you use alert tools. The most common among those tools is Google Alerts. You need to setup search queries using the tool to receive emails that list pages where you had been mentioned in. Otherwise, you’ll receive plenty of junk emails in your inbox.

 Here are a few advanced search queries you can use to setup in your Google Alerts (I’ll use my site name as my example):

• Digital Philippines” –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “digitalphilippines” –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “Venchito Tampon” Founder –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “Venchito Tampon” content marketing –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “”Venchito Tampon” link building –site: digitalphilippines.net

Once you received an email, check if the site correctly linked to your page. If not, reach out to the webmaster and ask him if he could link to the right page.

Regularly outreaching to bloggers who haven’t linked properly to your page would help your blog increased its referral traffic (especially if the page that linked to you is of high quality and ranks on SERPs for a certain keyword).

5. Target bloggers’ or peers’ email lists for content placement

If you already started a good relationship building with influencers who have newsletters in their websites, this technique would be easy for you. If not, you still need to reach out to a few of them to get in touch with your brand.

The method is simple. You have to get those webmasters with large number of subscribers in their newsletters to connect with you. You can incentivize them just to have your content placed in their regular newsletters or start to have a good conversation with them.

The higher the number of subscribers in the email list, the higher is your chance to get referred traffic (through email). This tactic still varies as you need to have a good headline so email subscribers would click on your content when they see it in their inbox.

Conclusion:

The main key to obtaining continuous flow of referral traffic is to create high quality linkable assets for your own site and these branded content pieces should be well distributed on different web places.

 Guest post : Venchito Tampon is a content strategist and link builder based in Manila, Philippines. He is the sole author of the content marketing blog, DigitalPhilippines.net. If you have any questions, get in touch with me @venchito14 or venchitotampon [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be happy to connect with you!

The post 5 Effective Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Edwards writes, “What do you want out of a personal relationship? Loyalty and value are at the top of this list. This is the same way you should think about link building and how you should approach it. Be valuable and loyal to people and you will have a high return on your time invested. It’s important to find those areas where the like-minded people are that you wish to communicate with.”

I couldn’t agree more with that assessment about personal relationships, value and loyalty. Finding like-minded people is important, but that’s not link building. Nor is it simply relationship building—it’s called networking, and it’s been around for as long as humans have walked the Earth.

Chameleons and Buzzwords

Relationship building, link earning and other new buzzwords are being thrown around to replace link building because of its admittedly sordid past. The industry as a whole doesn’t focus on building spammy links anymore, but we still build links. People are quick to leave the old at the altar and marry new terms. They’re quick to rebrand themselves. But at the end of the day, we’re still building links. We don’t need to abandon ship. We can build relationships and build links at the same time, but they’re not the same thing. One cannot replace the other.

Relationship building isn’t bad—it’s one of the keys to success in business. Link building is not the same as relationship building. When link building reaches its highest potential, it includes elements of relationship building. The middle of that particular custom illustration should be large and robust, but they’re not the same thing.

Survival Becomes Marketing

Let’s talk about relationship building, though, because it’s an important topic. For the purposes of this article, let’s embrace the old ways and refer to it as networking.

Imagine a tribe of cave people. They knew how to kill the woolly mammoth, but they were cold. A neighboring cave tribe knew the secret of fire, but they didn’t have much to eat. Cave tribe A networks with cave tribe B because, hey, they have something in common and they can help each other out. They build a relationship. That simple concept has escalated forward into marketing, sales, link building and everything else we do.

We build links to make money. We need money because we want to support our relationships just as much as we want to support ourselves. Nothing in this world happens without relationships. That’s especially true with link building.

The thing about that, though, is that you can’t force relationships. Sometimes when you write a guest post and it’s placed on the perfect site, you don’t exchange more than a few words with the webmaster. Either they don’t have the time or the interest. It shouldn’t happen that way the majority of the time, but that’s reality. You’ve still created a good link, but a relationship wasn’t built in the process. A relationship doesn’t automatically flicker into existence when a hyperlink is created. In the best circumstances, a relationship is created along with the link, but there are plenty of times when that’s not the case—and the link is still perfectly good.

Who You Know

The relationships you do build are important, however. They’re not just important for your link building campaign; they’re also an important part of your overall marketing strategy. You might even make an actual friend in the process, which is just as important.

Good relationships often provide us with great link opportunities, give us new ideas and allow us to take a look at the industry from a different perspective. They also open doorways into other new relationships.

Getting to know the editors of a popular industry website is a fantastic networking opportunity. The same goes for participating in the industry’s online community with comments and social media. Those are valuable relationships for obvious reasons.

I talked about it before, but link building and networking should cross over often. In an ideal world, the two would always cross over. A quality link can be built without a relationship, but if a relationship is built along with it, your overall marketing strategy will be better off for it. The two fit together closely, but they’re not the same thing. Networking is essential for businesses. Networking is an essential component of any effective online marketing strategy, and so is link building. They work together, but using a fancy new buzzword does not mean that link building is the same thing as networking.

When Edwards writes, “Try thinking about link building as a way to build value and loyalty with people in your vertical. Not only will it be a longer-term effort that just spamming people for links, but the effect will be longer lasting and way more authentic.” she is absolutely correct.

Spam, as far as effective link building goes, is a thing of the past, for a normal business (shady tactics still exist … and they might get you a quick rank and along with it a big ranking penalty). Though we’re still mending some fences, the industry has moved beyond building spammy links and onto creating useful links powered by human brains.

We want to approach every blogger and webmaster like a human being and provide something of value—but that won’t always yield a relationship. Link building is not networking, but they’re both valuable weapons in any online marketer’s arsenal—especially when they cross over.

About the author

Jon Ball is VP of Business Development for Page One Power. Jon specializes in developing highly effective link building strategies for clients across the world. Trained as a professional portrait photographer, he still passionately pursues photography as a hobby.

The post Sick to Death of Relationship Building appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

A completely different topic is search engine optimization directly for or with Facebook. How can contents within Facebook be found the best? Up to this point, this question was not really important. The old Facebook search was a joke in my eyes and rather reduntant, because the results weren’t acceptable in no sense. The new Graph Search made a change. It provides several possibilities to be found better on Facebook and it may bring another search engine back into serious business. So what do you have to care if it’s about “Facebook SEO 2.0”?

Facebook Graph Search becomes relevant

As a SEO, do you have to think about Facebook Graph Search seriously? A bit in any case and you can’t ignore it because Facebook is simply too big and influential. But let’s just have a look in the past and find out, what SEO for Facebook looked like until now…

Before Graph Search it was extremely important to optimize a Facebook page for a better performance with Google. Google lists many pages from Facebook and if you did a good job, you enjoyed some benefits from Google, for example increased traffic. Additionally, you also had to do some offpage optimization if you wanted a better performance for certain keywords.

Alle these things are still counting, if you want to be found on Google with your Facebook page. However: thanks to Graph Search, Facebook now offers a excellent possibility, how content on the social network can be found much better. Compared to the old search, this is a real progress. Also, you can now even more actively ensure that your own Facebook page receives still more attention.

Facebook wants Facts and Figures

Don’t forget: the profile of a Facebook page should be as detailed for Facebook SEO 2.0, if you want a good performance. All relevant information must be available. This is very useful for targeted searches. In addition, Facebook users generally like to inform themselves. The more interesting content you can provide about you or your company, the better.

It’s similarly, when it’s about posting content on a Facebook page. Here it is useful when there is a continuous flow of information. That keeps existing and potential fans in line. It also ensures that Facebook itself recognizes that this page is a more relevant page. More content means more interactivity. For Facebook SEO 2.0, interactivity is a major ranking factor.

It’s hard to believe, but Bing becomes a bit more relevant than before. The search engine from Microsoft, which has only a small market share in Germany, provides results from its web search on Facebook. In the US, Bing may have a bigger market share than in Germany. Compared to Google worldwide, it has only small influence – but like I said, it becomes more important now. So in the future, it may happen that Facebook for example shows more local search results. And it could also happen that results directly from Bing are displayed. If you don’t have good rankings on Bing, then this may mean a disadvantage. Time to deal with at least a little about SEO for Bing.

Benefits for Local Businesses

Facebook is not only a worldwide and huge network, it has also strong local connections. In plain language: many companies which operate only locally and not necessarily global or nationwide, are on Facebook. These companies are dependent on social interactions with local references. It is therefore useful to make sure that they provide a way for local customers to check in via Facebook. Thus the Facebook page should also be a Facebook place.

Related to social interactions, you have to care about local aspects. If you locally engage with a Facebook page, you can quickly become an important and relevant source in this local context. Regarding Facebook SEO 2.0 it means that you can have important advantages over local competitors.

And no matter whether it is locally or around the world: the appearance, so the Facebook page, should be very professional and offer the best experience to the user. This starts with the cover photo, goes beyond the notification area and does not cease with optically quality content such as good images. Example: the local confectioner can present images of current cake creations on his Facebook page. This has clear added value firstly within Facebook and secondly it ensures that current and potential fans could become customers. Don’t forget: Facebook is always about added value, don’t do anything on Facebook if you can’t provide that.

Graph Search Alternative to Google?

All this of course causes work, but in the long term it can be worthwhile just to put more energy into the topic of Facebook SEO 2.0 – although the new Graph Search for many is still not available, it represents a real alternative to Google search, alone due to the mass of data which Facebook has.

In the future, networking on and with Facebook will still be very important. This can be done with different channels, one of them is the organic growth of a Facebook page, what you can do with excellent content. But also Facebook ads can be a solution. It is important to increase the range of a Facebook page to reach or get more fans.

What applies to the Google search is also relevant for Facebook SEO 2.0 in any case – a Facebook page with better content provides more interactions, a lower bounce rate and a longer dwelling time. These factors play a role associated with the new graph search. Most importantly however, a comprehensive networking within Facebook continues to be the best way to success.

About the author

Bjoern Tantau (*1974) is a German specialist for social media, search engine optimization, content marketing and link building. He works in the online marketing industry since the late 1990s and has since then successfully built up and supervised numerous projects. He wrote a book about Google +, appeared with several interviews on German TV and has an own column at t3n, one of Germany’s leading technology magazines. In addition, he regularly writes for popular and influential websites, blogs and magazines and works as speaker, coach and trainer. He is also host of a well-known German social media podcast.

The post Useful Tips for Facebook SEO 2.0 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than an Infographic is worth more than that. How it combines complex data to form graphical representations which demands immediate attention and helps in the understanding of an intricate topic quite effectively! Sounds good?

Having said that, I feel that the concept of Infographic is underestimated and it has lost its charm in the hardcore world of link building strategies. Strangely, it seems that they are created for the sake of thrusting links into them.

Infographic creation is an art. Ideas could get ripped apart during the initial process itself if not managed properly. Below, I have mentioned some basic tips to get started with your Infographic campaign. Hope it works for everyone!

1. Put Your Thinking Caps On!

The concept of Infographic should not be taken for granted. Undoubtedly, it is the best medium to express facts and data graphically to convey our ideas. As an Infographic creator, you should creatively surpass your own limits each time you create a new one. This requires high levels of innovative ideas on a regular basis. Agreed, that Infographic is just one of the ways of promotion in content marketing. But, we can’t neglect the fact that a graphical representation attracts more readers and stays in their mind for many years to come. Don’t ever compromise with the quality of your content and when it comes to Infographic, just make sure it has a catchy concept.

2. An Infographic Has To Be Eye-Catching

The design should be such that the visitor should consume the information as quickly as possible. The whole idea should be perceivable in a few seconds. Design has much more to it than merely fonts and colors. Design is the creative foundation, presentation of information with a goal of generating interest. The following points should also be taken into consideration while creating the almost perfect Infographic:

1. The Flow of the Infographic: The viewer should feel like he is walking through a story.
2. Colors: Infographics should have attractive colors, but again they should justify the theme.
3. Clarity: Make sure the points are mentioned precisely that covers the whole explanation.

3. Push Your Infographic Through A Distribution Plan

“Content will not become Great until it is distributed at the right places”.

The same stands true for Infographic. It is evident that we need to bring on more light on the ideas for distributing Infographics. However, I could jot down a few ways of effectively distributing your wonderful creation; create a blog post, find influential sources who could push the Infographic through their network, submission with article/press release, promotion through YouTube and other video hosting services, submission to sites like www.dailyinfographic.com, www.visual.ly, www.infographicsarchive.com, www.infographicjournal.com, to name a few.

Basically, one of the best ways is to approach the masters of your industry niche with an honest aim of getting their feedback. Find some more influencers and post your Infographic to your social media profiles thanking them for their valuable support. They will reply to your posts, eventually spreading the reach of your Infographic.

4. Show Only Facts and Figures

The obvious reason for creating an Infographic is to give information about a particular topic or issue. One of the major pre-requisites for an effective Infographic campaign, is having accurate information on hand. The Infographic design should be such that it provokes others to talk about it. Don’t overwork on the design so that it hides the message to be conveyed. A design should give justice to all the statistics and information that you want to share.

Having said that, you also need to make sure that the facts and figures are accurate and are not manipulated as the credibility of your Infographic depends majorly on the information shared through it.

5. Infographic Should Be Thought Provoking

How often do we feel the urge to buy a product instantly when we see the commercial on TV? Similarly, the design, the content, the color, the pictures in the Infographic should be able to trigger the senses of the viewer so that they could take your desired action instantaneously. Infographic is a content, and all the rules of writing a good content also applies to this. You have this big idea in your mind and you need to demonstrate the same in such a manner that it generates excitement, force people to think and would like to share with others.

Again, as it is a content, it should be unique, high-quality and relevant. It should attract the attention of the visitors in a way that it makes them think and propel to take action.

6. Make A Clear Call-To-Action

Our goal, admittedly, is to get more and more people to our marketing circle. Sometimes, achieving this goal becomes one helluva task. One of the simplest reasons for this failure is that the Call-To-Action is not loud and clear. Of course, we design the Infographic to share some information. However, we couldn’t overlook the fact that all our perseverance is targeted towards getting more traffic. You will certainly miss the peak if the CTA is not clear.

Make your call-to-action visible enough at the bottom of the Infographic. It could be asking your viewers to follow your company on twitter, entering their details, or downloading some more information of their interest. Make it attractive enough for prospects to complete some kind of your desired action & engage with your organization.

7. Develop The Habit Of Saying Thank You

One phrase that is taken for granted not only in our day-to-day lives, but also in the business world is saying “Thank You”. This practice has become extinct.

Keep a check on the URL’s where the Infographic was published and also the title of the same. You can do this with the help of Google Alerts or also you could use TweetDeck. These tools will enable you to get all the updates when your Infographic is shared, commented on, pinned or liked. Keep this habit of thanking each time you see that an action has been taken by the viewer. This increases the interactivity which in turn will help in expanding your circle.

7 out of 10 viewers might not have the idea on who created the Infographic. However, if you acknowledge their support, you may increase the count of your followers. Give them a reason to follow you!

Here, I have covered some of the basic points required to create and distribute your Infographic.

Be a little more realistic about your Infographic campaign as improper distribution could lead to a failure and all the efforts and time invested in creating a great Infographic will go in vain. Start networking and find influencers who will definitely help you in distributing your content to the right people in their social circles.

Here are some cool SEO related infographics from cognitiveSEO:

• Black Hat vs White Hat SEO
• What in the name of Google is a “Panda” 
• 14 Facts (& more) about Blekko

This is a Guest Post by:

Sanket Patel is the Founder of Blurbpoint.com. Leading SEO Company since 2006 specializes in Advance Guest Blogging Services, SEO Services, Link Building, Online Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing and many more.  He deeply researched upon Panda/Penguin ultimate recovery process which is working successfully.

The post Infographic – The Lucrative Strategy to Represent Your Content appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Is Google evil? What is the big search engine up to?

In their constant effort to make the search engine a better place for its users and (AdWords) customers, Google’s team has strict Guidelines for webmasters and bloggers.

Anybody who wants to serve up content and rank an article or page on their search engine, needs to follow these rules… Or, they risk getting their rankings penalized or even various pages removed from the index all together.

When it comes to SEO, things have drastically changed in the last 12 months, and they don’t seem to stop. Both, on-page and off-page ranking factors have suffered repeated updates.

You remember Panda, Penguin, Page Layout and EMD, right? These updates were stimulating everybody to create better, more targeted content, avoid black hat techniques and provide site visitors with a pleasing reading experience… in order to boost the return rate and lower bounce back ratio.

Google is not your enemy!

Google wants (just like you and me) to provide its users with nothing but quality content (and relevant ads) so their searchers can spend quality time on each site or landing page. This helps both the search engine users and advertisers return more often to Google, and grow their business – you win, Google wins, and their clients win.

These changes and updates are required in order to keep everybody happy, and at the same time, disallow spammers and mass link-builders to take advantage of or control the Google SERPs.

Dangerous SEO Technique #1

Low Quality Content and Ads Filled Sites

You remember the famous MFA (made for AdSense) websites, and how they got penalized?

Google Panda updates revolve around thin content sites that provide less articles, and more ads for their users. Do you feel like these one page advert filled sites don’t deserve to appear on the first page of Google? I think alike.

2013 is said to be the year of high quality content-packed sites. With great content, you won’t be forced to overly optimize your page, which is another issue that might trigger Google to give you a warning.

What does quality mean?

Google has their definition. Pro bloggers have theirs. I would say that quality content (regardless its length) is first of all information that helps the user get things done (solve a problem) in their life, or business, faster, better or easier than before.

Want to write quality content?

Due diligence is required.

In depth research is a must.

Look up the top 10 blogs in your niche or industry. Target the ones publishing the best content. You know what best means from a mile away, right? It’s not general, it’s specific. It does not share theory, but gives personal insights, case studies and anecdotes.

Analyze the best featured articles, and try to grasp, what makes them hot, viral or high quality.

Then imitate the writing style, and content ideas. I am not saying to blatantly copy-cat your competitors, otherwise how will you stand out? The key is to innovate. Surpass your competitors’ content, or, at least, talk on subjects they’re not covering, or they’re often overlooking. That’s how you become visible, for both your users, and the Google radars.

Dangerous SEO Technique #2

Link Schemes and Black Hat Techniques

Google Penguin updates go against sites not abiding by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They frown at black-hat methods including but not limited to cloacking, keyword stuffing, duplicate content (having the same page identically appear on multiple domains which you own or control), or blatant linking schemes.

A recent example would be the Interflora penalty. Their “advertorial” marketing approach was caught by Google. How they operate was simple: they paid other people to write reviews and post them on other (non relevant) sites, in hopes that they would boost their Google rankings and search engine dominance.

Matt Cutts, recently, sent his followers a Twitter reminder, emphasizing the fact that Google’s guidelines on paid links passing PageRank (PR) apply to “advertorials” as well.

What we can learn from this case study is essential. While low quality back-links might lower your rankings or not count at all, paying for ads or links to boost your PR is against Google’s policy. This does NOT mean you are not allowed to advertise or link-build. Google is against this approach on non relevant web sites, but they like to see value pointing to value.

If you do advertise or insert paid links on targeted websites, at least, avoid keyword stuffing. In fact, diversify your hyperlinks and make them look natural. That means you have to blend in the ad or link within the content, and at the same time, do it on a small scale.

From what I understood, Interflora got penalized because of doing this paid advertising on a major scale, and targeting non relevant sites. That’s like spending your advertising budget on all kinds of TV and radio commercials, expecting to increase your brand awareness and generate sales.

That’s a dumb, and now dangerous marketing approach, as sales are generated when you’re targeting a relevant crowd of buyers or prospects, not a pool of individuals who don’t want to hear from you, yes?

Dangerous SEO Technique #3

Back-Linking Networks and Guest Posting

LinkVana and other similar networks have been hit hard by Google. And that’s well understood. Imagine you’ve been working hard, for the last few years, building a good linking profile, abiding by Google rules, writing good content, and attracting quality links, naturally.

And here comes, some guy, out-ranking you on Google SERP, because they’re using some shady linking farms and networks. The approach was quite simple. You hire someone who could throw up low quality (or even good) articles. You post them on the network, along with all kinds of non relevant sites and articles. Within a month, you’ll have gained probably hundreds of back-links. And the next month, you’re out-ranking sites which have spent years working hard and building a natural linking profile.

Don’t you think Google has to stand out and punish this irresponsible practice? We know Google like to create fear among webmasters and are a known propaganda machine, but they are smart. Make no mistake…

Thanks to them, we now may be able to benefit from all the hard work we have done for all these years, and still remain on the Google radar and get organic traffic. However, this does NOT mean you should overlook the latest Google changes, if you want to stay on top of your game.

Spammers and black hat link builders have caught on to these updates, and now are using the Google Link disavow tool to remove bad links from their site, and some of them are going to take the web by storm with a new method: mass guest posting. This is a new twist on the back-link network method.

You target (more or less) relevant blogs in your industry, you write (good or bad) content for their site, and do this on a large scale. Within a month, you could have 10… 20 and even 50 articles back-linking to your web site or page.

The approach in general is not good or bad. It depends on how you use it. If you guest post with the sole aim to increase your rankings, then Google will hunt you down, and manually or automatically penalize your site. And there you go again, you’ll have to start all over again, from scratch.

These are the top 3 most dangerous SEO techniques we have to avoid for 2013 and beyond.

Be smart, have patience, and outsource (wisely) your content marketing. It’s time we revamp our game, and be friends with Google, or they can easily spray out our web sites from the SERPs. If you really want to get a penalized website site back on the radar, learn how to clone your old domain (and remove the offending domain hosting account) to a new domain. However, seek to build new natural links and learn from past mistakes… In no time, you’ll be ranking again. But remember, visitors first – search engines second!

Guest post by:

John Gibb is a top super affiliate in the health industry and known SEO addict. Download his free super affiliate handbook: “The Road to Success” ($197 VALUE) and learn the free techniques he used to generate 109 sales in a single day.

*Photo via Roku

The post Top 3 Most Dangerous SEO Techniques to Avoid in 2013 and Beyond appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

The link request is probably one of the most crucial parts of link building. If done correctly, you will ultimately get your link. If not, then you will lose the opportunity. The following are some tips to make sure that you get the link you want by composing a great link request.

Use a Good Subject Line

The first impression that people will receive from your email will be made through the subject line. Consider a link request or guest blogging request as a part of a sales pitch – you want to make a good impression from the get go that lets the recipient know that you are contacting them with a great offer. This is about them, not about you. Craft your email’s subject line accordingly.

Address the Website Owner by Name

One of the things that turns off website owners right from the start in an email is a generic greeting that usually comes in the form of Hello Sir or Madam, Dear Webmaster, Hi Admin, and so forth. Take a moment to find the name of the person you are emailing before you do so. Some good places to find it include the following.

• About Page – If there are multiple people listed, look for the person who is the webmaster or is the person responsible for the website.
• Contact Us Page – Sometimes the clue might be in the email address (i.e., dave@domain.com).
• Blog Posts – Look for the main author, not other guest posters.
• Social Profiles – See a link to a LinkedIn Company profile? You may be able to find the owner’s name in the list of current employees.

If those spots don’t reveal the name, you can also try a Whois Lookup to see if the website owner’s name is publicly available. That’s also a good thing to try when you can’t find a contact us page or email address on the site.

Prove That You’re Familiar With Their Site

For starters, make sure whatever you are asking to place on a website, whether it is a link or a guest post, is relevant to the site’s audience. If it’s a site about home decor, you don’t want to request a link placement to a SEO firm. If it’s a blog about gardening, you don’t want to pitch a post about car hires.

Next, mention something specific about their site. Note that you enjoyed browsing through some of the sites on their resource page (Site A and Site B are your favorites) and then mention that you also have a similar resource that you would love for them to share. For guest posts, say that you really enjoyed a specific post on their site and would love to contribute something similar.

Talk About How Your Link Benefits Them

Now that you have showed the website owner that you have done your research, you are ready to pitch your link or guest post. Again, remember that the goal is to make it all about them. You want to say that the link you are suggesting for their resource page or content will not only tie in perfectly but also be beneficial to their audience. That your guest post will be informative and valuable to their readers.

Check Your Grammar

Especially when it comes to guest post requests, you want your grammar and spelling to be as close to perfect as possible in your email. No one wants to take a guest post from someone who can’t write an email correctly.

Steer Away From Too Much SEO Talk or Demands

Another deterring element in a link or guest post request is too much talk about the SEO side of things. You don’t want to put too much importance on whether you will receive a dofollow link or specific anchor text. You also don’t want to sound like you expect the website owner to do anything. You’re making a request – make it politely and let the website owner feel like you would be honored to work with them. That’s the best way to ensure your request will receive a positive reply!

Have any other tips about link and guest post requests? Share them in the comments!

The post How to Compose Link Requests That Get Positive Responses appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

High authority, relevant backlinks are gold for search engine rankings. And we are always attempting to trace and to get our hands on them.

When it comes to find the best backlinking opportunities, there are two options. The first is to do your own prospecting by identifying influencers, thought leaders, and adjacent (related but not competing) niches in your industry. The second option is to promptly find the most valuable links your competitors build, and to try to get those sites to link to you too.

This second option is called competitive backlink analysis. If you’re out for the low hanging fruit, the second option is probably what you’re looking for. After all, why not piggyback on their research, saving you precious time and money?

A component of our SEO services is link building. And part of that link building is performing a competitive back linking analysis. Invariably, when we start working with a new client they want to know why ACME Inc. or AJAX Corp. is outranking them. We show them why by performing few analyses, one of which is to reverse engineer their competitor’s backlinking strategy.

I use MajesticSEO and SEOmoz to gather raw backlinking data, and then use Excel to perform the analysis. Usually, these were all the tools I need. Until recently, that is. I have now added a powerful new tool to my arsenal: Cognitive SEO’s tool.

In this article I will show you how to use this incredible backlinking analysis tool to identify your competitors’ backlinking strategies.

There’s a ton of analysis you can perform, but in this article I will show you how to:

• Weed out the dead links from the live ones (a time saver by itself when you go over thousands of back links).
• Identify their most common backlinking strategies.
• Dig deeper into their strategies by identifying tactics like important followed blogs your competitors are commenting on.
• BONUS: I will share some filters to show you how to pinpoint specific backlinking strategies.

These are just a few of the things that one can do with Cognitive’s platform. Inbound link analysis is just a component of the platform – you can actually manage your link building campaign and track SERP rankings too, all under one roof. That’s nice.

For the purpose of this article we will focus on Inbound Link Analysis only.

Once you’ve created your account on Cognitive, I highly recommend that you link it to your MajesticSEO account to get more backlinking data.

If you want an in-depth analysis on your competitors’ backlinks, you have to create a campaign where you define your site and your competitors’. Don’t just use the Backlinks Reports, as those reports are just a quick overview on their backlinks.

You’ll get an email when the crawling of the backlinks is done. Select your Campaign at the top and choose the Inbound Link Analysis tab.

Cleaning up the dead links

SEOmoz tool is a good source for basic backlinking analysis, but the main problem with its data is that it contains all backlinks, live or removed.

So, the first thing you want to do in Cognitive’s SEO platform is to weed out the dead links. That way your analysis is focused only on currently live backlinks.

To do so, use the Inbound Links Filters:

It’s also a good idea to group links by domain, so your analysis evaluates partners, and not pages.       That is especially important if you analyze competitors that have a lot of site-wide links. You don’t want to end up analyzing 100 pages on the same domain. One or two is more than enough to identify your competitor’s strategy on a specific site.

The final result will look like this:

Important note about the Inbound Links Filters

All the reports provided by Cognitive SEO platform (webpage type, link positioning, link status, nofollow links, deep links) are also accessible as filtered attributes, features or metrics.

For example, if you want to identify backlinks in the footer, you could go to the Link Visibility report under the Inbound Link Profiles tab and look at the visibility breakdown:

But you can use the filters to access the same data in the complete Inbound Link Portfolio report:

Filters are actually a very powerful way to segment data from a report in even more detail.

A note on nofollow links

The platform also allows the exclusion of nofollow links, but I strongly recommend performing the competitor analysis including this type of link. You can uncover new link partnerships this way.

Most common strategies

Finding out what strategies your competitor is deploying is so easy, you won’t believe it. Just use the Webpage Type report under Inbound Links Analysis:

As you can see, we’ve identified that the most important backlinking source for this particular competitor is blogs.

Digging deeper with blogs

We’ve identified that blogs are a major backlinking strategy for them. Using filters, we will now dig even deeper to find out:

–        Which links are live

–        Which links dofollow

–        Which links are in the body rather than the footer and header

–        Which links contain the word “SEO”

All the results below are delivered in seconds:

BONUS: Specific Backlinking Strategies Filters

Use the following filters in the Inbound Link Portfolio report to pinpoint specific backlinking strategies:

To identify blogs where competitors are commenting and links are followed

Sponsorship opportunities

Guest posting

Exact match backlinks

Backlinking URLs with a lot of authority (lots of links pointing to them)

Juiciest backlinks (few outbound links from those pages and high home page PR)

For this one you have to use a mix of reports and filters:

Article directories or Press Release sites that dofollow

Finding country level backlinks

Kudos to Cognitive SEO for developing such a powerful and useful tool for backlinking analysis! Use it wisely and,

See you at the top!

The post How to Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Backlinking Strategies appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.