With the art of search engine optimization comes many challenges and procedures, with most basic optimization methods focused on keyword saturation and inbound links. It is with this focus that many people neglect to mention the purpose and benefits of having outgoing or outbound links on your site. These types of links help create new relationships with other sites and this process has in many aspects turned former competitors into cooperating partners. For those of you who wish to understand more about the basic concept of outgoing links, these tips will guide you in the right direction.

What Outgoing Links Do For The Target

In the olden days of search engine optimization, one of the biggest ways to rise to the top of search results was to have the most outgoing links on other sites pointing to your site. In other words, the more links, the higher your ranking would be. Since then, search engine algorithms have become more complex but similar sentiments are still integrated within Panda and other SEO-related ranking systems. As a site owner, you want to have tons of links pointing to your site as it will increase both PageRank and traffic and it is a good way for search engines to determine if your site is a legitimate source of information, commerce or other content.

What Outgoing Links Do For You

There are certainly less benefits for you to host a link to an external site, but the act of doing so can reap bigger rewards. There are many websites on virtually all subjects that have notoriety and authority among search engines and yet maintain a grounded understanding of how traffic and online relationships can be a net positive. If you provide a link to a given website that is related to your site and then contact the webmaster, you very well may be able to score a link on their site to yours, which will give you added authority. This is not a sure bet but can be done on a case-by-case basis.

Easy Way to Score Outgoing Links

There are plenty of high ranking sites on the internet that you can use to score quality outgoing links on their sites that point to yours (which would be an incoming link from your site’s perspective). There are press release sites, comment sections on highly-read newspapers and online portals and many other assorted sites. Check out Alexa and its ranking system to get an idea of the most trafficked websites on the internet and proceed to explore each to determine which ones are suitable for your URL.

Learn From The Competition

If you are curious as to which outgoing links your competitors have, then try out Pingler’s Link Extractor Tool, which will isolate and display all outgoing links from any given website into an easy to read text box. From here, you can check out each site and even get ideas as to which sites may be doing reciprocal linking with your competitor. This will help you find potential sites that you can link with to boost your own PageRank and traffic with only a reasonably small amount of effort.

Whether you are putting a website together for the first time or are a seasoned professional, you may be wondering how you should proceed with optimizing your website so that as many people as possible will be able to find it. The best and most tested way of increasing traffic to your site is using keywords throughout the pages that will attract and indicate to search engines specifically what your site is about and from there, how to categorize it. These suggestions will point you in the right direction of discovering keywords that are a great fit for your site and hopefully will educate you more on the basics of keywords.

Brainstorm Your Category

Once your site is deployed, ask yourself: what exactly is my site about and what would people search for to find me? This is the biggest question as the process in question (what people search for to find you) is the most important way to drive traffic. By having the answer to this question, you have accomplished the hardest part. Jot down a series of words and phrases that may be relevant to your website; for example, if your site specializes in plumbing, you may want to include plumbing, pipe repair, sink repairs, and other words in your initial draft of potential phrases.

Use Generators

Once you have a list of potential keywords and phrases, you may want to also use a keyword generator to get even more ideas. Pingler offers a Keyword Suggestion Tool that will give you dozens of suggestions from just one keyword selection or entry. By adding these to your list of previously conjured keywords and phrases, you should now have a list of several dozen different possibilities that can be incorporated into your website and content.

Go Local

Now that you have tons of keywords to check, you should consider which ones of these you can begin to use in a local sense. For example, if one of your keywords is “sink repair”, then you may want to reduce the likelihood of irrelevant visitors finding your site by making it “sink repair Dallas” or “sink repair in Phoenix”. This will give your site precedence in local search results where your services are more likely to be used. If you are marketing to a broader audience with products, you can still use local keywords as a trick to bring others to your website; feel free to have a variety of landing pages with various locales keyworded into the content.

Pick Keywords With Few Results

It will be much harder to break into a keyword that has millions or tens of millions of results. After compiling your list of selected keywords, narrow it down further by searching each one. Any keyword that returns more than one million results is probably not worth your time. Keywords with 50,000 results or less are virtually guaranteed to give your site the top spot once optimized correctly. Keywords between 50,000-1,000,000 results will take more time to conquer, but are still very doable and should be considered for your site.

We have all seen advertisements for other websites on Google and various search engines that work to consistently drive traffic to those sites. Unfortunately, many of us cannot afford to take out a major campaign to advertise our sites and so we must resort to other measures. There are plenty of examples of free advertising that any webmaster can do to increase the likelihood of someone discovering and browsing his or her site. These tricks outlined below will help to increase traffic, promote your PageRank and increase your site’s visibility over the short-term and long-term.

Join Online Forums

This is a great way to increase your traffic and visibility. There are many premium forums and discussion boards all across the internet that rank high in search results and have lots of members and visitors, and there is no better place to start your advertising binge. Make accounts with several forums (the higher the PR, the better) and gradually grow your reputation here. Over several weeks, try to plug your site whenever it is relevant and helpful. This is great for traffic and when posted on high PR sites, will earn you valuable backlinks. You can also earn backlinks from having your URL in your forum profile and signature.

Submit to Directories

There are tons of site directories out there that allow you to add any given site for free to its databanks, with many of these directories having high PR. What this means for you is added credibility in search engine rankings, which will increase your traffic even more. Some of the best directory sites out there include DMOZ (unique content required), Yahoo (non-commercial sites), and the WWW Virtual Library. This should be one of your first steps in optimizing your site for SEO and also a great way to increase your advertising potential.

Reciprocate

In your quest to rise to the top of search results, you will probably come across other like-minded sites that may be in the same boat. While in many cases these sites may be viewed as competition, you should be able to discover some sites that you can begin link building with in order to improve your traffic and number of backlinks. It never hurts to ask a fellow webmaster if they are interested in such an affiliation; just make sure that the sites in question are relevant to one another. Linking to other sites without discrimination can lead to other PR rankings due to penalties assigned by having a larger than necessary amount of irrelevant links on your site.

Hit Up Social Networks

Some of the best advertising in the world can be found on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. If just one person shares your link or story, you can instantly gain access to hundreds – if not thousands – more impressions and clicks. If you want to simplify your link and hide the full URL (perfect for sites like Twitter with character limits), then you may want to try the URL Shortener Tool from Pingler. It will consolidate your URL into a short string of characters that can then be used without losing all of your available typing space.

After having an email account for several years, you probably are used to checking your email each morning and finding dozens of emails from a variety of sources.  Many of these e-mails are a result of you signing up for accounts with other companies and websites, while some have obtained your email address by purchasing it so they can send you unrelenting amounts of spam.  Whether you have just created a new e-mail address or are trying to save your existing one from spam, these tips will go a long way in keeping your inbox free from junk.

Unsubscribe

If you are receiving an endless supply of junk in your inbox, try looking at the bottom of each email for unsubscribe options.  In most countries, the law requires that companies offer a way for you to unsubscribe from their email lists and to be freed from the daily and/or weekly barrage of emails.  Generally, there is a link at the bottom on which you can click.  You will be redirected to their website or that of the company that manages their email service.  From here, simply input your email address and you will be removed from these problems.  I managed to decrease my email load by 50% just through this one trick.

Avoid Unnecessary Checkboxes

Whenever we are filling out registration forms and the like, we may neglect to notice that there are “voluntary” checkboxes that will be automatically selected in order to have permission to blast us with tons of emails.  Always make sure to read over what each checkbox entails in order to avoid any new spam from making it into your inbox.  Checkboxes such as these can make the difference between getting one email per month from a company versus one email per day.  Anything such as “Can we contact you?”, “Would you like to receive offers every hour?” and the like are clear signs of this.

Create An Alternate Email Address

Many people simply keep more than one email address for the purpose of keeping their primary email address’ inbox clean and clear of spam.  Whenever you register for a new product, website or service, you can use the alternate email as a way to collect whatever information is necessary or to activate an account.  This will keep you protected while still having full accessibility.  Generally speaking, you can use an email account like this for all other things besides your personal correspondence, which would remain on your primary email.

Don’t Give Out Your Email

You would be surprised at how quickly someone can find your email address when posted online, in forum profiles or in other similar circumstances.  Never give out your email in its actual form: rather, use a tool such as Pingler’s Email to Image Converter to make sure that your email address cannot be simply copy and pasted by a bot or user into a list that they will then sell to spammers later on.  Doing this is perfect, especially for posting online advertisements on sites where bots are notorious at crawling the pages for email addresses.

Every single day, there are countless bots, spiders and crawlers perusing the internet on behalf of major search engines that are collecting information about each site and page they come across.  Your site – especially if it has many backlinks – may be indexed several times per day by bots that are looking for any changes that have been made to the website.  If you want to take advantage of these bots and their constant patrolling, you will want to make sure that your site is optimized for their presence. These tips will provide you with ways to augment your site’s indexing potential and allow you to get properly indexed.

The First Three Sentences Are Crucial

On each page, you should have a page title, article title and page content.  One of the best ways to make sure bots, spiders and crawlers are comfortable on your pages is to make sure that you use titles and headings that are relevant to the rest of your site.  Spiders and bots have become increasingly intuitive and look for matching content sections on each page.  You will also want to make sure that all of your keywords (or rather, the first instance of each) appears in the first two or three sentences of the page.  Your article or page title should have also emphasis on it (<em>, <h5>, etc) so that search engines properly index it along with the rest of the page.

Have A Site Map

Especially useful if your site is new, site maps give search bots and crawlers the ability to find all pages on your website.  Some of your pages at first may not be locatable by spiders and crawlers due to the lack of backlinks and internal linking, so a site map incorporates links to all of your pages in one easy to find section.  Based on the formatting of the site map, you can also indicate to the bots which sites are primary pages, which are secondary and which are tertiary.  Site maps work well on websites that have 50 pages or less.

Small Edits

Your site is completely evaluated by these crawlers, so it is vital to make sure that your site doesn’t have any aspects to it that could lead to a downgraded PageRank or other rating.  Some of the most common ways to avoid being perceived as a spammer is to reduce the instances of dashes in your URL (common in blog posts) and to use your keywords at a rate of approximately 2% density.  When creating anchor links on your site for example, use keywords in the hyperlink instead of “click here” or “visit this page”.  Finally, be sure to spin the descriptions on any products or services offered; if you are selling a product that a thousand other websites sell, do not use the generic item description.

See Your Site Through Their Eyes

Pingler has released its Spider Viewer Tool that gives you first-hand access to what search engine spiders are seeing. This strips away all of the code such as HTML and allows you to see what the spider does in relation to content and keywords.  This will let you know the extent of your keyword usage and whether or not excess and unnecessary content is being indexed by major search engines.

If you are an entrepreneur that suddenly has found his or herself having to take care of dozens of niche sites, it can be overwhelming at times to keep all of them optimized and full of up-to-date content. While each site’s needs are not particularly time consuming individually, the cumulative effort needed to keep large numbers of sites running can be more than a full time job, especially if you are creating all of the content. In order to be successful at managing an array of websites, you must have a game plan for dealing with each specific niche. All of the ideas presented here today will help you begin sorting through your situation and help you get your website management ordeal under control.

Consolidate Hosting, Use Website-Friendly Providers

One of the easiest ways to reduce the amount of time you will spend maintaining each site is to consolidate all of your sites onto one server or hosting plan. While many people may already do this, there are tons of webmasters out there that have acquired sites over time and have left them on various servers. Some people argue that having sites spread out prevents the likelihood of all of your sites being down at once, but you can also easily determine whether there is a server issue or a website issue based on whether one or all sites are affected by any given issue. There are also great hosts out there that provide an array of benefits; some plans offers automatic upgrades to all WordPress sites, which is one less thing to have to do.

Hire Third Parties

While some sites are not profitable enough to place in the hands of another person, you may be able to limit some of the work you have to do if you have some profitable sites in your portfolio. For example, a blog that requires an update once per week could have its content written by a firm for as less as $20 per month; if you are generating $50 or more per month from the blog in question, it may make sense to outsource the content or entire management to another individual or company. Content is by far the main time consumer of maintaining multiple websites, so it makes sense to trade off some of the profit in exchange for less money with less work.

Use Multiple Site Tools

For sites running on the same platform, you can push updates and changes to them all at once by using any number of tools available for things such as site updates, content publishing and link updates. Any information or content that is the same for multiple sites is a great candidate for tools such as these. There are also tools that can fetch information for you about multiple sites, with Pingler’s Multi-Rank Checker Tool being one of them. With this, you can input the URLs of up to ten websites at once and fetch both the Google PageRank and Alexa ratings for each URL. This helps save you time and lets you check on many websites at once instead of checking each URL individually.

After being in the search engine optimization game for a bit and making your first big bucks designing, creating and marketing your website, you may be ready to embark upon buying up starter websites that already are earning sums of money. Many better-off SEO enthusiasts will pay a nominal amount for a functional website with some revenue stream and then proceed to either allow that site to continue to generate income or improve its ranking and content in order to gain even more. There are many tempting offers out there regarding website sales, but not all are created equally. By following these tips, you will avoid the pitfalls of being scammed or ripped off when buying a website.

Show Me The Money

If you are attempting to buy a website from its current webmaster with the promise that this site generates revenue, then do not be afraid to ask for login credentials – not screenshots – of the accounts where money is being generated by the site. There is absolutely no reason why a seller would not provide this as he or she has total access to his or her account and can gain access back to it in the event someone (you) were to try to “run off with it”. By seeing the revenue generated directly from sales, leads or conversions, you can verify the claims of the seller.

Inspect the Site’s Setup

It is not too much to ask for the login credentials for the site as well, in order to inspect how the site is setup and what search engine optimization tactics are being used. You do not want to buy a “fresh site” that is using black hat SEO tactics to gain traffic; this will only end in your site being flagged by Google and other search engines later on and will spell the end for your potentially profitable venture. You also want to make sure that you are familiar and capable of managing the site; not all sites are designed with the same suite of software.

Get A Second Opinion

If you do not know all the ins and outs of website construction and search engine optimization, it may be a good idea to reach out to a SEO-proficient company and allow them to inspect the site in question. They will be able to tell you whether or not the site will be profitable in the short and long term and which specific SEO methods are being used to build the site’s brand. Of course, you are free to change this as you go and tweak it however you wish, but having a SEO company inspect the site prior to purchase should reduce any possible issues you may have later down the road.

Verify The Site’s Standing

There are plenty of tricks that site scammers use to trick naïve buyers into purchasing a “lame” website. One of the most common methods they use is replacing the actual site’s header with information that is relayed from another more popular site. Whenever you check the site on major rankers, it may show up with a better PageRank than it actually has. In order to eliminate this possibility, try Pingler’s Fake Rank Checker Tool. This will let you know whether the information being displayed about the website in question actually belongs to the website or is being redirected from elsewhere.

When conducting business or personal interaction on the internet, email is traditionally the primary form of communication.  As a result, gaining access to an individual’s email can be quite lucrative and you can bet that there are plenty of people out there just waiting – and maybe even actively trying – to gain access to your account and in the process, access to your banking information, sensitive personal data and personal correspondence.  There are plenty of reasons for somebody to break into your email, but there are no excuses for letting it happen. These tips will give you a better idea of what actions to take in order to protect your identity and email account.

Flavor Up Your Password

One of the easiest ways that email accounts are compromised is by users using a password that is easy to guess or similar to their email address.  Programs designed to break into email accounts through rapid password guessing can also break many easy to guess passwords in just a few seconds.  Protect yourself against this scenario by making sure that your password contains numbers, letters and even variations on capitalization.  It is also a good rule of thumb to never use the same password for your email and any other account; if that account is compromised, they may try the same password on your email account as well.

Use PGP Encryption

Whenever working with other businesses or individuals on certain tasks, it is a good idea to encrypt your emails so nobody else can read them. PGP encryption allows you to generate a key that is used to identify the person to which the email is being sent. Only that person – with their key and their own password – can open the email from you. Likewise, you must have your key and password to open any email from them. This prevents any sensitive information from being in limbo or vulnerable while in transit and also while stored on your email account.

Send Anonymous Emails

If you are needing to communicate with someone whom you would like to hide your email address from, then Pingler’s Anonymous Email Tool can be a lifesaver. Simply input the email address of the person you are sending it to, an email address from which it appears to come from, a subject and the content of the message. You can send an email to anyone without using your name or email address. We can easily think of many good reasons for using this tool and we’re sure you can, too.

Employ Common Sense

Finally, there are plenty of old school tactics that you can use to minimize the threat of someone invading your email. Never open an attachment from a source you do not recognize, never give out your email password and avoid giving out your email address to everybody. Many people keep two accounts: one for personal use and one for use with accounts and junk mail. Remember: the fewer people and entities that are aware of your email address, the fewer people who will potentially have access to it.

There comes a time in every webmaster’s life where he or she realizes that the site they designed is now either out of date or lacking in aesthetics and functionality. It’s a careful balancing act to make sure that the site in question is fully featured without crossing the line and making it seem like a cluttered mess. Particularly the case if you are coding your site from the ground up, you are 100% responsible for having everything in the right place. When considering a revamped site design for your new, existing or upcoming website, please keep these ideas in mind as ways to add a little something extra without going over the top.

Social Buttons

While most content management systems now have social networking functionality built in, you will need to add these manually if you are in charge of the maintenance of the site and have built it through your own hard work. There are examples of social buttons all over the web and they are used for everything from Facebook to Google+ and LinkedIn. For sites that have been built from the ground up, these buttons will help add an extra layer of functionality and sharing options that may otherwise be lacking from your online presence.

Web Widgets

Web widgets are great for adding specific content to your site that may be relevant to what your site already offers. For example, if your site is a major relay of news and opinion, you may find widgets released by CBS News and CNN to be of value. Likewise, sites dealing with sports may wish to use a widget available from ESPN or USA Today Sports. There also are tools such as Widgetbox and WordPress plug-ins that allow you to make your own widget boxes; making your own widget gives you total customization control and you can mix and match any and all topics of your choosing.

Date/Time Feature

While such a simple feature, having the time and date on your site can come in handy for your visitors for a number of reasons. One example of this utility is if your customers are logging on to respond to a last-minute sale and want to make sure that they haven’t missed the cutoff, they can refer to the site time to verify whether or not they can still take part in your sale. Using UNIX for this is ideal, and Pingler offers a Date to Timestamp tool that allows you to input the date and time on your website using a constant, standard method.

JavaScript

Last but not least, JavaScript is an important tool and should already be incorporated into your site’s design.  While some forms of JavaScript can cause issues for your site with search engine ranking systems, the versatility of JavaScript by and large can be used without worry. Some of the key functions of JavaScript include navigation assistance, user prompts and other client side selections. This is great for running stores and other dynamic, interactive pages as you can relay your customers/visitors through various portals on your site as needed.

Despite concerns that the nofollow tag that accompanies Twitter links means that PageRank and other algorithms are not changed by links posted to Twitter, the reality is that Twitter’s social links have essentially canceled out this issue, giving you the ability to build both your presence and backlinks through Twitter.  Since social links now work the same as backlinks, you can use Twitter just like any other website for posting links to: since Twitter is a high-quality, authority site, this makes posting on Twitter smart and necessary in building an extensive backlink presence.  Here are some guidelines to consider when building your backlinks on this social networking platform.

Develop A Solid Profile

One of the best and cheapest ways to expand your presence on Twitter is by building up your own account(s) that can be used to push your links to others.  Not only will this expand your presence through backlinks (thanks to your established Twitter profile) but others who see you message may end up passing it along, adding even more backlinks and traffic to your site.  Twitter profiles that are established typically have lots of followers, a low follower to following ratio and lots of incoming links to the profile page.  While you are working on establishing your own authority Twitter profiles, you may want to consider the next option as a short-term solution for boosting backlinks and traffic.

Hire A Twitter Pro

While Twitter remains relatively demonetized by its owners, those in search engine optimization and advertising have learned how to make money helping others with their own endeavors. There are plenty of “Twitter services” on the web that offer everything from established Twitter accounts (typically very pricey) to backlinks on a per-mention basis. The best and cheapest short-term route is to pay a Twitter user to post your link to their followers several times over a period of a few days. This approach is very effective and will give you backlinks and traffic.

Communicate With Others

Twitter is a large community but many personal connections can be built by reaching out to other users. When someone needs help, answer their questions. When you are polite, friendly and approachable, you will find that many people will want to follow you and as a result, you will build authority on your Twitter accounts. You will also be amazed at how many people will voluntarily re-tweet your links for you if you are simply nice to them. Communication is everything – it’s obviously the essence of Twitter – and you will achieve great results by using this approach.

Track Your Progress

After using Twitter for some time, it can become more difficult to track back all of your backlinks manually. Thankfully, there is no need as you can track everything by using Pingler’s Twitter Links Finder as a way to see where you’ve got backlinks and how you are proceeding with saturating the platform with your offerings. You can check each page simply by typing in the URL; results of the number of backlinks on Twitter for the page in question will then be displayed for you to record.