I’ve heard bloggers mention that linking to other blogs or sites is not a good thing to do. They say it bleeds off page rank and shows that you don’t have anything original to say. I disagree.

You need to link to other blogs and sites (periodically) when there is information on another Internet page that can be of value to your readers. The search engines love this kind of participation, and so will your readers. For instance, I would link to this article at ctbizblogs.com because it reads well on the same subject as this post.

Here is another great article on the virtues of outbound linking over at successful-blog.com.

Another plus your blog gets when your article links to another on-topic Internet page is this; when you create a link you are adding to the number of keywords found in your page code. In other words, when you add a link in a post, you add the URL address of the page you are linking to, which will likely have keywords in it that are on-topic to your post. You will again be adding critical keywords to your code when you title the link. This is a powerful realization. This all has to do with spider bait for the search engines.

I’ve also heard bloggers mention that posting on other blogs is not important due to the fact that most have blogs have no-follow tags for comments URLs. I disagree.

First of all; Some blogs do not use no-follow tags in the comment URL presentation. Second of all; it’s very important to keep in the loop by posting your comments on other blogs. Let em know you’re there! Let other bloggers see your idea(s) and let them see a link to your blog or site. This is critical when you are just starting out with your blog. If you are new to this and want to learn how to make a comment, just click the comments link at the bottom of this post, and leave your bit. If you don’t have a web site or blog, simply leave the URL field blank.

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There was a time back in the dark old days of Internet optimization (like 2 years ago), when webmasters simply gathered as many inbound links as possible – and I’m talking about any old links. Link farming was almost the status quo, if you can believe that. Webmasters would gather inbound links by the hundreds every month from web sites that had nothing in common with their own.

It worked very well too – if you could recruit over 1000 inbound links to your site, you could rank very high in the search engines. (especially Google). But that game is all over now, and if you are still doing that kind of linking your site has likely been punted from Google, and perhaps MSN as well. The game has changed dramatically, so I want to update some of the new players who might be reading this.

The kind of linking you need to do is what I call “natural linking” – meaning the procurement of inbound links that makes sense to the search engine algorithms. Try to only add a handful of good links to your site per month. 5-10 inbound links every month will do fine. Below is my definition of a “good link”.

Definition of a good link:

a) An inbound link from a pagerank (PR) of 3 or higher
b) An inbound link from a page that is on topic with your web site or blog

Avoid linking with sites that have nothing to do with yours. This a sure fire way to get Google’s shirt in a knot. They’ll penalize you for that kind of linking, so don’t be tempted to load up on inbound links with some kind of fancy software or script. Just be natural about it.

You must be sure not to add other sites by large numbers per month, or harvest inbound links in droves every month. Google sees that as “unnatural linking” as well.

The best way to get unbound links is slowly, and from other bloggers or webmasters that are pointing out your content to their visitors. This is a very natural process, and the search engines will love your site or blog for it.

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It’s becoming common knowledge that a web site needs to be linked to from other web sites in order to rank well in the search engines. Therefore it’s important to monitor how many inbound links your web site has, and how many are being added as time goes on.

To check the inbound links going any of your sites or blogs click here. Enter your domain name(s) and email address and then click send results. The results will be sent to you (without any additional spam), showing you the inbound links in the following search engines:

AllTheWeb
AltaVista
Google
MSN
Yahoo!

This is a quick and easy way to see how your site is progressing

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I never used to take meta tags very seriously, until I stumbled across a series of tags that seemed to actually make a difference with my web page indexing. I found this meta tag combination by complete fluke.

I was building a site for a friend and he had chosen a particular template online. I used his template and was surprised to see how well his site was doing in search. I had optimized his site exactly the same way I had optimized my sites in the past, but his was doing much better. I eventually tried using the same meta tags that his template had. It worked.

So now I use the meta tag pattern below for all my static sites and my blogs.

To get the meta code I use for static web sites, right click here and select “Save target as..”

To get the meta code I use for WordPress blogs, right click here and select “Save target as..

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When you create a page or post for your web site (or blog) it’s important to make sure the URL is also good spider bait for the search engine bots. Make sure you title your page around the main keywords you want the traffic on. This is also know as “Pretty Links” or “Pretty URLs”. For example:

(h)ttp://www.yoursite.com/your-great-article-title-with-your-desired-keywords-in-it.htm

For a static web site I would title the page with dashes, so that the URL ends up the URL example above. If you use a WordPress blog there is a way to make this happen automatically when you make a new post.

You may have noticed that all the pages of your default WordPress blog have URLs that look like something like this:

(h)ttp://www.yoursite.com/?p=15

The above URL is not ideal for search engine indexing, so there is an easy way to change all that. Follow the instructions below to change your URLs (permalink structure).

Download this file (1.htaccess.txt) right click the link and select “Save Target as…”. Download to your computer and then upload it into the root directory of your hosting server. Should be the same place your WordPress index.php file lives.

Once you have the 1.htaccess.txt file uploaded to your server, change the file permissions to 777 (see our video tutorial on how to change file permissions click here) After you’ve successfully change file permissions, change the file name from 1.htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

Once you have done the above, login to your WordPress blog and click options and then permalinks. Choose one of the permalink options. (I suggest using the Date and name based choice, or a custom choice of your choosing) Then click the Update Permalink Structure button at the bottom/right of the page. That’s it. Now your URLs will be search engine spider friendly, using the title and the main keywords of your post in the web page address. This automatically changes all the URL addresses of your blog, so you want to do this when your first start your blog.

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The first installment in my SEO series is going to touch on affordable SEO (search engine optimization). The idea of this series is to give you ideas that can optimize your web site or blog for search engine appeal without spending big dollars.

Once you have a web site or blog created and on it’s way, you will soon be receiving emails from SEO companies that promise to optimize your site and increase your traffic for a price. The prices will range from the one time optimization fee to the monthly fees. Some of these companies charge thousands of dollars per month for their services. The goal of this series is to help you carry out search engine optimization on your site without spending any money.

This is not so much about reader and visitor appeal. As I’ve mentioned many other times, focusing on your content and how it can help your visitors is the key factor, BUT it’s important to have your site (and all of it’s pages) optimized for the web.

The next installment of the SEO series will be in regards to meta tag.

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