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.

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.

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.

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.

At the fundamental core of search engine optimization is the science of keywords. There are millions of websites all competing against one another to dominate certain search results and the way the leaders of the industry achieve this result is by finding the best, most precise keyword selections for their particular site and then proceeding to dominate in that category. Keyword selection and deployment is both easy and difficult, depending on who you ask and what level of keyword penetration you are seeking to obtain. The following is a summary of some basic pieces of advice that will have you using better keyword etiquette – in both research and deployment.

Use Niche Specifics

One of the biggest mistakes people make when attempting to create a successful website is trying to incorporate a variety of mismatched keywords into their site’s content. Google and other search engines will recognize what you are trying to do and flag your site; this leads to penalty points and can bump you down in the ratings. Avoid this scenario by using keywords that only pertain to your site. If you are running a site about online piracy, it does not make any sense to have keywords on there relating to health and beauty. Not only will this attract unsatisfied visitors, but will also lead to consequences in your PageRank results.

Use Elaborate Phrases

Some of the best keywords and phrases for an up and coming site are those that are the longest and most obscure. Search habits vary widely, and many people will have many ways to search for any given thing. If you want to aim for results in the mobile phone industry around the holidays, “the top 5 best cell phones for Christmas” is a far better phrase than “best Christmas cell phones” when it comes to competition versus traffic. While the latter keyword may have more results and may be searched more often, there are also many more websites vying for dominance in that keyword. Start your site’s reputation by gaining notoriety in keywords and phrases that are less common. If you do well here, you will be able to gain ranking in more simplified keywords later down the road.

No More Than 1,000,000

Everybody has their own “cut-off” point, but it is safe to say that most newer sites should strive to compete in keywords that have less than one million search results. If I was running a site that sells scarves and I wanted to gain more immediate keyword penetration results, I would perhaps look at two different keyword possibilities: “purple scarf” and “lavender scarf”. “Purple scarf” returns over seven million results, while “lavender scarf” only returns around 700,000. They are virtually the same thing but are two different ways of saying something, and I guarantee you there are people out there who will search for a lavender scarf over a purple one each and every day.

Check Your Ranking

Finally, after you have been attempting to gain notoriety in specific keywords, you will want to keep tabs on your progress.  Pingler offers a Multiple Keyword Rank Checker that allows you to see how well you are doing on any and all keywords on your site. Simply specify the keywords and the tool will give you your results.

While it is pretty obvious why having a higher ranking with popular search engines is important, there are many other small reasons why page ranking is valuable to you and your website.  Being discovered is crucial in keeping your website afloat and the bigger you become, the more you will observe a snowball effect: more and more people – from visitors to advertisers – will flock to your site to view content, participate and engage in partnerships.  I have outlined several reasons why high page rankings are good for your site and how you can use your situation to benefit in other, lesser known ways.

Increased Backlinks

While many people build backlinks to increase their page’s rank among Google, Bing and other site ranking systems, there is a circular effect that occurs after a certain point.  When your site has become more popular, you will find that there are plenty of other sites who will want to link with you.  Due to penalties that can be imposed on your site by Google and others, you will want to carefully evaluate each link and make sure that the site in question is relevant in subject to your own site.  This strategy not only benefits your site but the site that you are linking to as well, so it’s a win-win under the right circumstances.

Faster Updates

Sites that rank high are looked at more often by search engine bots and spiders and as a result, get their newly published content indexed faster than smaller sites.  If your site provides news and is trying to get the first spot in a search result for a news event, having a higher PageRank will mean that your news articles are picked up faster and will be displayed at the top of the search results for visitors to inspect.  This also leads to deeper keyword penetration, as the more of your pages that are indexed, the more keyword results you can compete for in search results.

PR Link Profit

Taking another perspective from building backlinks, there are plenty of webmasters who will pay you for a link being placed on your site.  Often known as PR Links (PageRank Links), these links can make you quite a bit of money and you can provide links in a variety of ways for a variety of different budgets.  There are sites on the web that specialize in PR Link transactions and if you have an ‘authority site’, you will easily be able to find prospective customers.

Where Am I Now?

Part of building your authority and ranking is knowing what it stands at and how it changes based on your actions.  One great way to keep tabs on your site is by using Pingler’s Site Rank Checker, which will give you the rankings of your site for Google (PageRank), PageHeat and Compete.com rankings.  Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the SEO gods, and with this information you can begin to competitively build your site up or if you already have a quality site, begin using it to expand its reach even further.

While search engine bots and search engine optimization methods have become more complicated and intricate in recent years, meta tags still provide benefits of use and allow indexing to be done quicker and more efficiently, which generally leads to more appropriate indexing and ranking methods.  Meta tags can come in a variety of forms and each has its own importance in aiding crawlers and bots with determining exactly what the particular web page is about and how to categorize it.  Here are a few of the most commonly used meta tags with information on why including each of these in every web page so important.

Title Meta Tag

Even though this may not technically be a meta tag, the HTML title tag is highly important in making sure that your site appears properly and is displayed in relevant search results.  This piece of code is what displays the title of the page at the top of any web browser and search engine crawlers use this information to determine in which specific search results the page in question will be displayed.  Besides this, the title of the page is obviously also the text that will be displayed for your page in search results, so it is a good idea to make sure that the title tags indicate the content or subject of the web page.

Description Meta Tag

The meta description tag serves as the general description of your page and will display in search results below your web page’s link.  While it is considered sensible to have this information encoded into your page’s HTML layout, not every search engine will pick this information up and use it.  For example, Google tends to generate its own description for each individual page, while Bing generally copies the meta description and uses it word for word.  It is recommended to use the first one or two sentences of the page in question as your meta description; this will increase your status with many search engine spiders and therefore, your page ranking in certain search queries.

Keywords Meta Tag

Very few search engine bots and spiders read this anymore, but the ones that do still demand some consistency in between the meta keywords and the content of the site.  When using this meta tag, make sure to only include keywords that are also mentioned somewhere else on the page.  If you put ‘meta tag generator’ in your keywords for example but fail to mention that anywhere else on the page, it is virtually guaranteed that the keyword will not be picked up by bots and indexed accordingly.

Extract Meta Tags From Your Page

If you want to see exactly what search engine bots and spiders are seeing when it comes to meta data on your site, then you may find the Meta Tag Extractor tool from Pingler helpful.  By entering the URL of the desired page, you can view all of the meta tags and data associated with the particular page and can then determine whether or not your information is being displayed correctly for bots and spiders to index.

Yahoo is one of the major search engines on the web and for countless millions of users, their main portal for news, entertainment and search queries.  Unfortunately, Yahoo’s indexing systems have never been simple and can take many times longer to index your entire site than search engines like Google take to crawl and index.  This has made Yahoo notoriously more difficult for new websites to work with and can prevent you from being discovered for months or even years by the average Yahoo user.  Today, we will go over some of the main negatives to Yahoo’s indexing and ranking system and also cover some tactics to help you decrease the indexing lag that is oh so often the case.

Yahoo Uses Bing

Since the summer of 2009, Yahoo has been utilizing Bing’s search systems for its website and therefore has no direct control over the indexing process anymore.  Previously, Yahoo did handle this aspect of its search results but it still took way longer for them to index than other search engines and they have since completely handed over operations to Bing.  While this makes things seem simpler, Bing’s indexing methods are in most cases no better than Yahoo’s old, slow process of indexing all the pages on a given website.  In summary, Yahoo is now mainly a reflection of Bing’s results and all original tips on how to index pages via Yahoo are obsolete.

Bing Is Slow

Much like Yahoo’s old way of doing it, Bing’s indexing methods mean that your site could exist without being indexed for months and could take far longer for all pages to be properly discovered and indexed.  Many sites with 10,000+ pages indexed in Google discover that they have less than 1% of that amount discovered by Bing.  Personally, I have not seen a website less than five years old that has a decent amount of pages indexed comparable to Google.  There are ways to increase the speed of indexing slightly and ways to check the progress (coming right up), but any webmaster should be prepared to “be in it for the long run” when it comes to being indexed in Yahoo/Bing.

Submit Your Site to Bing

One of the best ways to make sure that your site is included in Bing results and therefore can grow quickly is by submitting it to Bing directly.  Bing’s Site Submission Page allows you to submit your website and gives you access to Bing’s Webmaster Tools for free.  These tools provide more access to influencing how pages are indexed and how each page is read.  While this method is formal and you might think it helps dramatically, expect a nominal improvement in your site’s indexing pace at best.

Check the Count

If you want to keep an eye out on how many of your pages have been indexed by Yahoo/Bing, you can use Pingler’s Yahoo Indexed Pages Checker to see exactly what Yahoo is displaying to its user through the Bing system.  Perfect for when you know how many pages you have in total, you can easily see if any new pages have been picked up and indexed since the last check; it gives you a better idea of the total percentage of your website that has been indexed.

Everyone wants to have lots of quality backlinks as they are the “backbone” to any website’s ultimate success.  It is virtually impossible to dominate any search category without having an established, reputable amount of backlinks and backlink traffic coming into your site and this often is the primary reason why so many websites fail in their quest to become the best in their field.  Authority backlinks are especially important and take your site’s visibility to a new level.  Some of the most well-known examples of authority backlinks comes from .edu, .gov and DMOZ online directory sources.  Here are a few tips to show you how to obtain these coveted authority backlinks and how to keep tabs on each authority backlink coming into your site.

Guest Blogging

When it comes to sites referenced by Yahoo or DMOZ, guest blogging is always an option to get backlinks from high-quality sites.  Many content-driven sites are always looking for guest writers in order to fill their pages and if the trade-off is simply an established backlink, most webmasters will happily agree.  Locate your intended “targets” and fire off emails to see who will respond in request to your offer.  You just may end up being pleasantly surprised at how many sites will take you up on your offer, as you can’t put a price on good, free content.

Forum Signatures and Posts

There are plenty of sites with authority backlink status that have forums where you can quietly and easily insert your website into your signature and/or profile and hence pick up additional authority backlinks.  Sites such as MSDN, Wikio along with many major educational institutions offer easy ways to post articles or ideas and in the process, get your desired backlink.  As always, check out DMOZ for ideas on where to begin as they break up their links by category and this makes it far easier to find the specific category of websites that you wish to use in your backlink endeavours.

Social Networking Communities

There are several ways in which you can also build backlinks for your site using the magic of social networking platforms.  One of the best ways that individuals build traffic is to create fan pages or documents that link back to your site.  Facebook is the most popular platform where you can utilize this approach and due to Facebook’s high PageRank, your site will get a boost from having its link affiliated with the site.  In order to be effective, however, plan on adding as many backlinks as possible; just one link to your site from Facebook or Twitter will not be enough to make a noticeable impression on traffic or search ranking.

Manage Acquired Backlinks

Keeping track of all your authority backlinks used to be a chore that required extensive checking and verifying.  One of Pingler’s tools, the Authority Link Checker, will return the results of every authority site that has a backlink to your web page.  In just one query, you can see each website as it is broken down by