Rambling

I'm sorry my posts here have been limited. I have been working so hard on my other blog that this one has suffered a bit. I encourage you to check out my Blogging with Cents though. I recently wrote an article on 5 Must Use SEO Tools to Reach the Top. I think it may be of interest to you if you are a serious blogger.

Are You Killing Yourself?

We all participate in link exchanges but how many can kill your site? A link to your site has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is better than a link from a site having a completely different topic.

BUT, things have changed. The fact is, Google doesn't approve of link-building schemes, and have recently made the leash a bit shorter.

Bad links can kill your site. Say you get involved in a link building foursome with a porn site you didn't even know you were linked to because you're too busy linking to everyone; you have just created a bad link and this will have a negative impact on your site.

Reciprocal Links are helpful but worthless at the same time. You link to a site in exchange for a link on their site. A link from you to someone else basically deducts one vote from your total vote count... meaning its value is minimal when compared to a 1-way incoming back-link!

1-way Outward Links really are one of the worst things you can do to increase your PR. Yes, it's selfish but that's how it is the big world of money hungry sharks. You gain nothing by giving out links with no return. This is why people participate in the no-follow attribute. By doing this, your basically telling the search engines that link is not a vote for your site by that site. Get it? Please know that I do not recommend being selfish. It will only come back to bite you in the butt. If you share, you gain potential readers and maybe future linkbacks.

It's imperative to build links relating to your posts and post titles. Don't link to just your sites name. That doesn't help at all.

Do some research on keywords and your posts and when your linking, be sure to connect the two. It takes time and a little bit of trial & error but if done right, your PR will shoot up.

Use Your Tool

I have come across some really handy sites to check statitics, PR, and more. I thought I'd share a few with you.

Ping your site with Dosh Ping. It pings all the bigwigs so your site gets crawled faster.

Website grader checks your website out and tells you how fast, slow, whether or not you have too much html, as well as some other statistics.

You really should be using Google Analytics for several reasons. Analytics is Google's very own visitor tracking utility, allowing webmasters to keep tabs on traffic to their site, including visitor numbers, traffic sources, visitor behaviour & trends, times spent on the site and a host of other information gathered via two pieces of JavaScript embedded in the source-code. It can provide so much information that will help you improve your site overall.

Keywords are very important. Some of the better keyword research tools:
a. SEOmoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool - this tool from one of the great SEO innovators gives you a good general idea of how competitive your keyword/phrase is.
b. Trellian's Keyword Discovery Tool - user-friendly, simple, and feature-rich. One of the best keyword research tools available.
c. WordTracker Keywords - second to none, WordTracker has been a leader in keyword research for years. A great value.

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