Ask-Me-About Forum

[Twig2K8]

Greetings Loz,

I've got my first 5 blogs and link directories pretty much ready to go. I have one quick question:

When I post to my blogs, I understand that I will add a link to my blogs in the link directories. Do I still want to post a "for more information about xxx" URL that points back to my main website at the end of each Blog article?

Thank you,

Twig

[Loz]

Hey Twig,

Sure, the best thing I can say here, is keep SEO in the back of your mind, and think more like a Marketer. As a marketer you know your area / niche.

When you start creating new pages, new blogs, submit new articles copy the URL's. Save them to note pad or a spreadsheet. It's what I do to keep track of the 10's of thousands of urls I submit. Some of the places that I submit to have a pattern of what their links will look like once you submit an article so it's not always necessary to go back and check for the link to copy from the address bar. While others do need you to go back, and in some cases you're notified when the article has been approved, etc.

Any ways, if it's a blog roll where you can place links on a blog, sure, a two / three worded keyword phrase would be suffice, but to use the same keyword phrases on every is not generally a natural method. Actually you can do this within your articles too, not just to other websites, but on your own and create articles around that keyword phrase that link up to that article on your website. Which I refer to as "Semantically Related Vector Theme Structuring" as mentioned on my SEO Revolution Blog during the Drive Traffic To Your Website Series, which coincidentally needs to be resumed at some point when I'm feeling better.

Ok... Let's suppose you had an "Internet Marketing" site and you created load of articles around that niche, and blogs, hubpages, etc, we could not only hyperlink "Internet Marketing" keyword phrase to our blog roll, but we can also hyperlink "Internet Marketing Online", "Marketing Online", "Online Marketing", "Tips About Internet Marketing", "Online Marketing Tips", "Direct Marketing", "Online Direct Marketing", "Direct Internet Marketing", etc.

What do you see that is most common occurrence there? The words "Marketing", "Internet", "Online", and "Direct" so effectively what we are doing is not just mixing it up with different combination's of the same keywords we generally want to rank for, we're not only killing many birds with one stone, we're also using LSI in our keyword phrases: "online" is semantically related to "Internet", "Internet", Is also semantically related to "Marketing"; well, not so much in a direct way, but more in an indirect way. "Marketing" is semantically related to "Work From Home" in also a indirect way, but it's closely related to "Making Money Online", plus "Internet Marketing" is semantically related to "Direct Marketing", and "Internet Business" respectively. "Internet Business" is related to "Work From Home" and all of the later mentioned phrases.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about here, either use Keyword Elite, or Google's Keyword Suggestion Tool ONLY. If you have Keyword Elite, just use the Google Suggestion Tool First before doing anything else. Work out what phrases are closely related to the main root keyword.

It's not just about getting loads of links with the same keyword phrase out there pointing to our websites' home pages, or other articles, it's about telling Google what our pages also represent, the more information you can give them, the better that the search engine can categorize your pages under the right search term. It's been said that Google uses LSI to rank pages. This is not so. Google uses LSI to know what a page is about and to help categorize that page under the right search phrases that are being used on a daily basis. It's not just Google either, MSN & Yahoo! use LSI too.

So other than doing above, sure, we can also mix it up by placing other words in the anchor text: "For more info about KeywordPhrase", "Related News About KeywordPhrase", 'More info "About KeywordPhrase"', etc.
What we're doing here is adjusting the keyword prominence of the anchor text. "Keyword Phrase" has a prominence of 100%, "About Keyword Phrase", and there it has a prominence of 50%.

End of the day it's just a matter of mixing things up, testing things out one step at a time and see how it improves your rankings. If you follow a set plan, knowing how SE's rank a page, it becomes second nature just like typing on a keyboard or holding a pen to paper.

Hope this helps.

[Twig2K8]

This absolutely helps and it makes sense.

Thanks again for all of your assistance, it is much appreciated.

Regards,

Twig

[AndyBlack]

Explained very well Loz. Well done. How do you find the time to help people the way you do? Keep up the good work.

Andy

[Loz]

He was lucky, I just woke up...lol Just kidding.

To be honest, it doesn't take much time, 5-8 minutes to write the post, fix typo's, isn't much time out any of anyone's day really, and if it can help the guys / gals, or readers move on to what they were doing once they know, all the better.

More questions that get asked (unique ones preferably), the more info I can squeeze out.

[Twig2K8]

Quick follow up Loz,

Sorry for being a pest, but I have a quick follow up question. Every time I think I have my head around this, I second guess my understanding a bit! Maybe wine and SEO don't mix well.

Your chart shows arrows pointing from the blogs to my link directories. This seems backwards to me, based on what I've been doing. My current understanding was that I would add links in my Link Directory categories, pointing to my relevant blog URLS. However, the chart would suggest the opposite, where I would have links residing on my blogs that would point to the link directory categories. Could you clear this up for me when you get a chance.

Thank you again,

Twig

[Loz]

Not sure what you mean Twig,

Refer to Page 7, paragraph 7. The arrows are pointing to your link directories from the first 5 blogs, then as you start pointing links to those blogs, the PR is funneled to your Link Directories, which then funnel down to every other page on your link directory. It's completely up to you, you could, if you wanted, place all your links on your link directory, point links from your blogs, squidoo pages, etc and what have you to your sites' pages, and just promote the monkies out of your link directory to get as much PR as possible to help speed up the indexing process when new articles are added to your site. End of the day, the way I'm showing it there allows the PR to be evenly distributed through all of the links

p.s
it's getting late here, so gonna sign off, thought I'd just let you know so you don't think I'm ignoring ya, but post away and I'll answer it when I awake in the morning (or the earlier afternoon)

[Twig2K8]

Loz,

I think my confusion, which is certainly my SEO "noobness" showing through, is in regard to the direction of the linking and where the actual link resides. For example:

Let's say I have a category and sub-category in my link directory structure that looks this: Computers and Internet/Laptop_Computers. Now, at the same time, my Blog #1 is highly relevant to laptop computers. It is my understanding that I would add a URL on the "Laptop_Computers" link page, pointing at my Blog #1. Assuming I've got this right so far, it would look like this:

Relevant Link Directory Category --- link pointing to ---> My Relevant Blog

Here is where I'm getting hung up. When I looked at the chart and saw the direction of the arrows, I thought maybe I should be putting links that would reside on my Blogs pointing in the direction of the link directory category. So it would be the opposite of the above and would look like this:

My Relevant Blog --- link pointing to ---> Relevant link Directory Category

Now this approach seemed backward to me and I was sure I was interpreting the Chart wrong. However, the more I thought about it, I came up with this question.

Q1: If all of my links to my blogs are pointing from the link directory categories to the blog, how does the search engine find its way back to the link directory from the Blogs when it crawls them? It would seem like it wouldn't know anything about the link directories, unless there was an actual link to the search directory category on the blog itself. Like this: My Relevant Blog --- link pointing to ---> Relevant link Directory Category

Q2: Is it finding my link directory because when it crawls the blog, it searches to see what other pages on the internet are linked to that blog?


Please don't take this as me arguing with your approach. I am so new at this, I'm just trying to learn and understand.

Best regards,

Twig

[Loz]

Morning.

Ok, let's try explaining it this way.

Relevant Link Directory Category --- link pointing to ---> My Relevant Blog = OK (one set of blogs, category, ie, Loans)

My Relevant Blog --- link pointing to ---> Relevant link Directory Category = OK (another set of blogs, category, ie, Loans (but home loan sector, but the "Loan" category is only available, so it still fits)

What you're not doing here is thinking outside the box, laterally.

Here's an image I just quickly drew up.



The blue arrows represent the "Blog Trail" Blog blogroll links, and or blog articles point to each of those green arrows. and so on and so on.

If you got say 3 links from each of those places above pointing to other articles to the other places, which also point to yours, it increases the relevancy factor cos you're not just doing one thing here like most people do, ie, get links from social bookmarking sites to their pages, or article directories to their pages, and so on. all they are doing is one set of linking, they're not improving the relevancy factor of their articles they submit out to these places, but only to their articles on their site, so by doing it the way I suggest, builds an authority factor on the other places you placed articles on. As the articles build authority, your main pages on your site increase in ranking. Why? Cos we're building a string of documents linking to other documents around the same topic / subject / niche / semantically related topic. This improves user experience, there are no dead ends, links to other resources keep going and going and going.

See the inner blue arrows? ie, blog to site, article dir to site, squidoo to site, hub pages to site, s.b sites to site, link dir to site, classifieds to site, ezine groups to site, blog to site.

K, now move the arrows around one, and start the process again starting from article directories. and so on til you come full circle.

Once you've done that, create another outer circle with links coming from other sources that point to the green arrows and also your site's pages.

[Twig2K8]

I got it! The new drawing definitely helped.

Thanks a million,

Twig