SEO for 2016: The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide (2015)

Chapter 5. Off-Page SEO

If you are on page 1 of a Google search for the keyword or keywords that relate to your website you get all the business. Of course divided by the other 9 websites on page 1. If you are on page 3 or later, you are in a virtual black hole. As I mentioned before, good SEO is about 30% what you do on page. Meaning how your website is designed and the content on your website.

Now let's look at the other 70% which is what makes your website appear to be authority on your websites subject matter. This includes everything from where your website is listed, reviews you get, how many visits you get, how much social media mentions your domain name, and the number of links from other authorities on the Internet to your website.

All of these things must appear natural to Google and the other search engines or your website will be just a memory. That seems like a lot, but let me break it down for you in the next few sections:

Placing Keywords in Your Incoming Links

The anchor text used to link to the web page should contain important keywords or keyword phrases. The linking text is viewed as "contextual" by search engines especially Google but can’t be the same on a large number of incoming links thanks to Google’s Penguin update.

The Google PageRank is based on Larry Page’s idea, who is a co-founder of Google. His idea was that a website that has good content and is more important will be linked to by many other websites. This is one reason that incoming and reciprocal links to your site are given a very high importance to its search engine rank.

Incoming links are links on other websites to your website. This metric is more reliable in search engines’ eyes, because it is much harder to manipulate another person’s website. If a link appears on the CNN home page, linking to your website with the term ‘great travel website’ in the anchor text, search engines can see that a highly respected site believes your website is worth linking to for the topic ‘’Travel Websites”. When it sees this it acts as if there is an imaginary voting system on the Internet and the link from CNN counted as a vote.

The Quantity of Incoming Links

Link building is one of the biggest SEO tasks. You can get your website to a Google PageRank of 2 without a single link, but after that your site needs to become relevant to the search engine with as many links as possible from sites that are in the same industry, related social media, other websites related to your websites topic or are news organizations.

Search Engines will often monitor the quantity of incoming links to a website. A large quantity of incoming links is an indicator of popularity or importance, and the search engines will favor sites with a larger number of what are now as backlinks. Search engines use the volume of incoming links to give better ranking to the more popular sites.

However, there is plenty of places here to get in trouble. If you go and create 10,000 links in a week and then no other links are ever made, you are likely to get blacklisted from Google. Link building needs to have an appearance that it was made naturally and gradually.

If you are in marketing there is something I hate to tell you. Most consumer don’t like you. In fact consumers are tired of your advertising on TV ads, billboards, and full page newspaper ads. They literally complain and rebel against pop-ups and pop-under ads, CPM, CPA, and CPC ads. They see ads now in bathrooms, on their phones, and especially the internet. I have seen a growing movement of people deliberately going out of their way to avoid advertising or complaining to any listening ear about them.

As an SEO expert, I am in the marketing business, in virtually every aspect of social media. I consider myself an expert at creating links, building content, making links, and creating a web presence for my clients without them realizing they are being advertised to or it is in the interest of SEO. Because as soon as an online visitor gets a whiff that what you’re doing serves a marketing purpose, it doesn’t matter what the quality of the content is they will duck for cover, and go away.

It is time to educate you on not only what is SPAM but how to avoid becoming a spammer yourself. First I will tell you how to get the best type of links. The ones that come from official news sources.

Incoming Link Quality

Not all links are created equal; therefore some link builders will spend months trying to get one strong link from a big, important, or relevant website. A sometimes good link-building tactic is to try to get thousands of links from smaller sites, which are presumably easier to get than a link on a highly prestigious site. Many of those websites will not stay low ranking and build up a ranking of their own. When they do you reap an even greater benefit.

Once you realize the importance of relevant incoming links to the success of your website, you will understand the need to engage in link building and how a professional ongoing link building campaign is paramount to the success of your website.

There is a reason that search engines care about links to and from your website. Remember our imaginary point system from the early chapters? The search engines treat your incoming links from other relevant websites as a “point” for your site. The more you have the better. Some sites give you more points. News outlets such as LocalNewsDay.com, ChicagolandNewspaper.com, CNN.com , and TheKnowVegas.com help your rankings increase faster because Google sees them as an official news source. A single link from a positive news story can be the equivalent of getting 300 PageRank 3 links from websites. That is from a single link. That is how important Google feels the links from official news sources is. Other site types that seem to give more points are .EDU and .GOV websites that provide links to your website.

Bad Links

The number of pitfalls to link building are limitless. You have to be very exact when it comes to following the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you see advertisements for the following type of links….Think twice.

· 10,000 links for $29.95 – Very dubious offers from spam emails offering you 5000 links for $19 are too good to be true. They lead almost directly to a penalty.

· Paid links on high PR sites – It’s actually quite easy to get noticed when you buy links on so-called high PR sites where the toolbar PageRank is 6 and above. When one website gets in trouble for buying links from the same sources, everyone listed gets the same penalty by default.

· Hidden links in WordPress themes or counters –Some Word Press themes sites are just SEO scams which rely on hidden links in the themes to be spread around. If you rely on such links for “link building”. You will eventually be penalized. Some visitor counters have done that in the past as well.

· Artificial link profile - with always matching anchor text – when every single link to your site is well optimized saying something like “SEO company” this might look too artificial to stay unnoticed by Google.

· Wrong language links – It’s obvious to search engines that an English site having thousands of links from Russia, India, Pakistan, or China makes the website standout and open to penalizing or blacklisting. Google engineers are smart enough to compare the language of your site and the sites that link to you.

· Gaining too many links too fast – it’s not always the more links the better. Even good links gained too fast can result in a penalty. Link building must be natural. If you get 10,000 links in a week, you better be prepared to do that every week forever or Google will see it as unnatural.

Official News Sources

I am going to give away one of my best kept secrets. For years I have had access to over 50 official news sources that have been able to give me the best links to my clients websites and deliver a marketing message to my clients they could not get anywhere else. Not only do the news articles deliver the marketing message you want to deliver, it doesn’t appear to be an advertisement, you create trust in your product or service, and you get a link back to your website that is the equivalent of hundreds of medium quality links.

So how do you do get the best link in the world for less than $50.00? Take a look at below. You will notice that the main article is about coffee fundraising and then there are ads under sponsors. Both of these great ways of getting links back to your website from official news websites that Google has determined are official news sources. There are many local news outlets nationwide. They have online newspapers as well as small paper newspapers you can get at supermarkets and local businesses. They like educational articles and they love to help those that are advertisers. It is a perfect example of, “You scratch my back and I scratch yours.”

There are some rules though. First you usually need to pay for a banner ad for the website. Usually less than $50 per month. It is about $30 per month for TheKnowLA.com which has about 15,000 visitors per week to their online news site. TheKnow news franchise has local newspapers in major cities all over the country and an ad will run about $40 per month on each website. One of the most expensive is Chicagoland Newspaper which runs about $200.00 per week but they have almost 20,000 unique visitors per day.

After you purchase advertising you need to submit a news article that is of journalistic quality where it doesn’t seem like an advertisement. One that interests people but doesn’t mention your company name until late in the article where your company and website are mentioned as an expert in your field and a quote from someone who is an expert in your company.

This way you educate the consumer, give trust in your company, get a link to your website and deliver your message without appearing to be an advertisement. This is one of the best ways to subtly advertise and get your message to the consumer and your help SEO at the same time and at a very low cost.

So who do you talk to do this? Here are my personal list of contacts.

Online News Source Email Address

TheKnow Franchise Advertise@TheKnowLA.com

Chicagoland Newspaper AdSales@ChicagolandNewspaper.com

NYC News Desk Sales@NYCNewsDesk.com

Good Website Links

There are an infinite number of places you can get good links to your website that are relevant and will increase your rankings. These are:

1. Websites in your industry (Experts, your suppliers, wholesalers, industry regulators, Industry training and certification sites.)

2. AngelasAndPaulsBacklinks.com is a monthly inexpensive newsletter with hundreds of easily obtainable links, articles on how to obtain links, and places that offer free homepage and deep links.

3. Charity websites, educational institutions, places you sponsor

4. Chambers of commerce, BBB, Industry associations

5. Customer reviews

6. Old sites with established domains

7. News organizations

8. Press release sites

9. Blogs and forums

10. Buy a blog instead of buying links on a blog.

11. Quality news articles

12. Websites from .gov and .edu sites

13. Social media and bookmarking sites

14. Customer review websites

15. Anyplace that you feel will bring you positive and relevant branding to enhance your company’s credibility.

Sidebar: Getting Good Links from Customer Reviews

Google’s acquisition of Zagat and its use of Yelp’s customer reviews brings a great way of creating links back to your website and at the same time increase social mentions of your website on the web.

If you break it down, there are four types of businesses on the web:

· Businesses that get most of their business from referrals could care less about reviews.

· Businesses that get most of their business from referrals, get online reviews and think that nobody reads them or even cares about them.

· Businesses that think reviews are important and work hard to get a s many as possible.

· Businesses that try to get reviews and don’t get very many.

The types that rely heavily on referrals and ignore reviews don’t realize that sometime in the next year or two someone is going to write something about them online and there is a very good chance it’s going to be negative. Your website can avoid some of these by providing a way for people to give comments on your website. Whether public or not and always make sure you follow up on comments that are negative.

If negative comments get around on the Internet, which it usually does thanks to Google, their referrals are at risk of drying up. If the first thing that shows up in Google for your brand name or your websites domain name is a negative comment or review, you are potentially in a very bad spot and risk losing business. In some extreme cases I have seen a company go out of business.

Positive reviews are great, the real power is in the reviewer. A customer willing to spend the time to review you is a brand ambassador is always a powerful ally. Instead of just asking them for reviews, you should be thinking about how you can harness your relationship with these valuable people to help spread the word, both online and off.

For those of you that try but can’t seem to get any traction with reviews, you should consider the following, on how to build review generation into their business processes.

Matt Cutts From Google

1. Do not abuse guest blogging links.

Matt Cutts said in December that you should not abuse guest blogging links. This means that if your blogging or commenting as a guest, yes Google understands that if you are an authority in your industry that you will have blog commenting or links but they should not say the same thing over and over and there should not be a majority of your links in this area.

2. Don’t buy or sell links!

Matt Cutts said in July that as if it was a surprise that Google tends to look at buying and selling links that pass PageRank as a violation of their Webmaster guidelines. “If we see this happening multiple times, repeated times, then the actions that we take get more and more severe.” Matt Cutts said.

Never buy links!

3. How many links on a page we should have? Is there a limit?

Matt Cutts has said that if you have substantial links on a single page you need to have substantial content.

4. When should you use the Disavow Links Tool?

Matt Cutts said, "Feel free to disavow links, whether you’ve been penalized or not."

5. What should be in blog comments?

This is one of the easiest ways to get links. However, Matt Cutts says you should make your comments from blog commenting genuine and relevant to the website. He also warned webmasters that blog commenting should not be a huge fraction of your overall link portfolio.

6. Should I guest blog?

Matt Cutts warned against doing guest blogging in large-scale and pay-for-links. He also warned against off-topic or irrelevant blog link building in guest blogging. In typical guest blogging, there is usually a paragraph that tells about the guest blogger and why you were invited to post.

7. If I have bad links show I try to remove the links before resorting to using the Disavow Tool?

Matt Cutts says that you should always try to remove links before resorting to is the Disavow Tool. Google wants to see that you have made an effort to remove those links before using the tool. He said, "If those folks aren’t receptive, then just go ahead and disavow those links. As long as you’ve taken those steps, you should be in good shape."

Disavow Tool - Common Mistakes

Matt Cutts from Google discussed the common mistakes he and his team continue to see people make when they are using the Google Disavow Tool. Let’s take a look at those:

1. Not uploading a plain text file: The file you upload has to be a regular text file. You should not upload Word files (.doc) & Excel spreadsheets.

2. Not looking deeply at your bad links: Many times webmasters send a Reconsideration Request that is just a light list of bad links. If you are a website with a very bad link portfolio, rather than using a butter knife, you might be wiser to use a chainsaw and go a lot deeper, getting rid of all your really bad links.

3. Don't add the HTTP or WWW of the domain name: The domain colon needs to have the right syntax. So add the domain colon and then a domain name.

4. Rebuttals should not be in the text file: Many webmasters have been putting excuses, context, or the story behind the link in the Dissavow Tool Text file. The right place to give Google this information is in the Reconsideration Request.

Customer Review Acquisition Strategies

When you get right down to it, there are basically four ways to get an online customer review:

1. Via phone

2. Via email

3. Via a Website

4. Via transcription from a hand-written reviews

Which method is right for you depends on how you conduct your business. One of the biggest mistakes I see is businesses that don’t collect email addresses for advertising. Most of the businesses I work with know they should but rarely do. Even when they do, they don’t keep their list up to date and one clients list we worked on recently had less than 10% with current addresses.

If email doesn’t work for your company, then you’ll need to consider how you typically interact with your customers. If most of your business is done in person then give them a comment card to complete and then put those comments online. If it’s over the phone, you may have to do it via mail. Try stapling a comment card with return postage to your invoice. Especially for those clients you have gone out of your way for.

When figuring out your customer review acquisition strategy, ask yourself what your staff can realistically do every day. Some tips for asking customer reviews:

1. Offer Incentives? A large percentage of your customers will do it for free. If you offer to pay your top clients, it’s possible it will backfire and they will get turned off, which could hurt your business by dampening the enthusiasm of these clients.

2. Make it easy for customers, but don’t send them a link to review you on Google unless they have a Gmail address.

3. Do not ask people for Yelp reviews. This almost always backfires. You may get a few positive reviews in the short term, but if your customers are not active Yelpers, Yelp’s SPAM filters remove them. You’ll end up with no reviews and potentially some angry customers who wonder why their hard work reviewing your company went away.

4. Send a request to review your company promptly. Don’t wait. People are most likely to give you feedback right away when they are happy with your service or product. The longer you go from the time of service to the time of your request, the higher the likelihood your customer will not give you a review.

5. If you have the customer’s email address, follow up your initial request three days later with a reminder email containing links of where to go for review submissions. Reminder emails can account for a huge percentage of review conversions.

6. Don’t setup a kiosk in your business. Funny thing is that some companies allow people to login to their Gmail and leave a comment right there in the business. The problem is, that all the reviews come from the same IP address. Even though they are valid, most SPAM filters and Google will see that they came from the same IP address and think they are being spammed.

Tip: I have often heard from business owners they feel embarrassed when asking customers for reviews. If that sounds like you, my advice is to be totally candid with your customers. In other words, under promise and over deliver and hope for good reviews. One good way is to tell your clients that you are working on improving your business and online reviews are a good way to do this. I have found that this kind of candidness makes the asker feel better about asking for reviews, which improves the chances of actually getting them.

If you still can’t figure out the review thing there are several companies out there that would be glad to help you such as the following:

· AngiesList.com

· CustomerLobby.com

· CustomerRating.com

· DemandForce.com

· MoreBiz.com

· Ratepoint.com

· Yelp.com

Link Juice

The term “link juice,” refers to the voting power that a link passes to a page in which it links. The fact is only Google knows exactly how much link juice is getting passed on from each link on a page. However, there are some basic factors we can use to determine how valuable a given link will be. Look for links with these qualities for better results:

· The page is relevant to your content.

· The link from the page to your page has a good anchor text.

· The other outgoing links on the page look relevant and appear to be to quality sites.

· The text around the link that you will receive is relevant. The page has been recently cached by Google.

· The page is a respected or authority page such as a charity, news, educational or government website.

Sidebar: The Orphan Page Link Test

An orphan page is a page that has no links from any other page and hence cannot be found by search engines. If you want to test if Google learns links. Place a link to the orphan page.

The next time Google indexes your page with the link to the orphan page, check to see if the orphan page was indexed by the search engines. If your orphan page gets indexed by Google, then there is a good chance the page you are testing is passing on link juice.

Linking Within Your site

It’s easy to focus only on inbound links, but there are important best practices for linking within your site as well:

Site maps – Create a good one. If not for your visitors, for search engines. It’s rough for search engines to have to drill down and find all that content. Make it easy for them. Oh, and keep it updated! Secondly you need to make sure that you have a site map for the search engines. Preferably an XML site map which you list the location in your Robots.txt file as well as upload it to Google Webmaster Tools.

Anchor text within content – This may be even more important for onsite links than for offsite links. You have full control of your anchor text, so use it. Plus your site theme is already in place, so each link will have complete, natural relevance to the page it points to.

Breadcrumbs – Are a little piece of search engine love. Breadcrumbs are not only helpful for navigation, but search engines can pick up great anchor text from them. Breadcrumbs are the navigation elements that large sites use to help categorize content, and allow you to find your way back to core categories if you lose your way.

Featured products, news, etc. – Links from your homepage are, in general, considered more important than links from other parts of your site. So if you’ve got something you really want to show off, it makes sense to put it on your homepage, not only for usability, but for search engines as well.

Links to yourself – Link to your product or service pages from your own blogs, articles, resource sections, news releases, or any other relevant pages. Use the anchor text within each of these resources to send a little link love to your core pages. So, for example, if you sell toothbrushes, and you write a blog post about correct brushing practices, link the word "toothbrushes” from your blog post to your main toothbrush product page.

Ways of Creating Great Content

Here are some great ways you can spend money to add unique content and value to your site:

1. Write how-to guide.

2. Place your brochure on your website.

3. Build microsites which are websites that focus on a single keyword or topic and work best when the keyword is in the domain name.

4. Build better keyword density landing pages.

5. Create a buying guide or catalog for your most popular product categories.

6. Write weekly press releases and news articles.

7. Create video reviews of your products or services.

8. Write open letters to your customers.

9. Care — deeply — about the quality of your writing, and about your audience.

10. Go deep with original research.

11. Share a never-before-seen interview.

12. Avoid redundant, duplicated, or stolen content.

13. Build so much trust with your audience that people would be happy to hand over their credit card.

14. Build your authority — and your site’s authority.

15. Spell correctly.

16. Fix factual errors.

17. Don't use bad grammar or text language

18. Write for humans to read but be acutely aware of search engine bots.

19. Create something nobody has ever seen before.

20. Remain balanced and worthy of your audience’s trust. Don't take one side over the other. You chance making a majority of the people upset.

21. Cover a topic comprehensively.

22. Create something people would want to share and bookmark.

23. Don’t overuse promotions, calls-to-action, and ads.

24. Write something a good magazine or journal would print.

25. Spend a lot of time on detail.

26. Create something people want to talk about positively.

Other Things on Your Linking To Do List

Look at all the free links you have pointing to your website. Also use Google Webmaster Tools and possibly a SEOAudits.com Report or an AccuQuality.com Report to get familiar with its 404 and 302 reports, log files, or broken links. Make sure that your own links and those pointing to inactive URLs, and URLs that are going through multiple redirects. Make sure all links are finding their ways to your active pages without passing through 302 redirects or some sort of redirect chain.

In my line of work, every time I beginning a new SEO campaign for a client, it never ceases to amaze me how many broken links I find in on their website. On some bigger websites there are thousands of broken links, not only from the website but to the website. The ones coming to the website to pages that no longer exist. If you used 301 redirects to fix these issues you would get the link value of those incoming links. These are free links that you earned! Make sure they are 301 redirected to active URLs.

Buy a Blog

Buy a blog instead of buying links is what I tell people. Google literally loves WordPress more than anything especially when you host it at a different IP as your website and get discussions going. Buying a blog can be a much more effective use of your money in the long run as well. You’ll get a lot more value than just the links, and you will never run the risks of being penalized for buying paid links

Using Social Bookmarking Sites

To get your links on social bookmarking sites, all you have to do is create a profile and post them. That part is pretty easy. Getting people to bookmark or vote for your links can be the tricky part.

To get people to bookmark or vote for your links, you need to be patient, and you need to be active on your chosen bookmarking site(s). Find other people with similar interests and colleagues that you already know. Share their links. They will be more likely to pay attention to and vote for your links in turn.

Popular bookmarking sites include:

· del.icio.us - The oldest social bookmarking website and most popular. Users can also add people to their networks and share bookmarks.

· StumbleUpon.com – Has a browser add-on for saving and sharing websites. Works with IE, and Mozilla.

· Digg.com - Digg allows you to submit stories, then digg users can "Digg” the stories, and make comments. Users can also upload videos, images and podcasts.

· Sphinn.com - Social bookmarking site for marketers. Allows you to share news, articles, etc., and participate in discussions

Using Directory Links

Search engines have not abolished directories. Google has simply gotten much stricter when it comes to acknowledging specific directories. Despite that, they are still beneficial for building page ranking and increasing traffic.

There are many different types of directories that can be of great value to your website or blog. You can search for directories on Google for good ones or for a small fee you can get your website submitted to thousands of directories by having services such as SubmissionComplete.com or WebsiteSubmitter.org do the work for you. These sites charge between $15 and $69 to perform the submissions. But it sure saves a lot of time.

Buying Text Links Is A “No No!”

This is definitely an example of what not to do as we mentioned in Chapter 1 talking about the Google Penguin updates and Panda updates. The major search engines do what they can to make sure a website’s popularity is not increased by the use of paid links or link farm. The cheapest link buying comes from Russia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and the Philippians. Google know where links are created and that is the fastest way now to get a red flag.

Creating Outgoing links

Outgoing linking is critical for blogs and websites. Many webmasters stopped linking out in order to hoard their PageRank from others in their industry but now it backfires. Having too many outgoing links can be as bad as having none. Somewhere between 15 and 70 outgoing links on your homepage can be healthy for a website. But this invites a lot of challenges. You need to make sure that your links going out to other websites remain valid (Not broken), they don’t link to those in a bad neighborhood (porn, spammy, hate, or political sites, etc.), there are no hidden links and they generally are in the same or a related industry, local, association, or a link to a website Google might consider a possible vendor.

Where are my links from?

There are several tools that can let you see what links are targeting your website. I was saddened that Yahoo Site Explorer went away in 2012. There is only one other I highly recommend and that is Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com). Bing has also has a limited version of the Yahoo Explorer in the Bing Webmaster Tools.

Diversity of Your Links

When trying to gain links you need to get a diverse number of quality links. If all the links you are building are from Blog postings with a PageRank of 1 it is very easy for Google to detect since that is very unnatural. You want to get links from sites with different PageRanked pages and not just blog postings.

It is best to choose a range of sites that are big, small, popular, unpopular, no PR, higher PR, etc. You should never ignore potential links from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook or from organizations you get business materials from or associations your company belongs to.

Negative SEO

As if business owners didn't have enough to worry about when it came to marketing their business online when up pops a very real risk of unscrupulous competitors attacking your website in a bid to get your site banned from Google or have your search engine rankings drastically demoted to the lost regions of Google's search results.

There is a bad side to SEO and you can fall in to the Negative SEO trap if you don't watch out for it. This has been an issue for a while, but it is now hitting the mainstream and is now also a tactic your competition may use against you. The harsh reality is that negative SEO practices can cause your site to drop in ranking and even be removed from Google altogether.

A short time ago a business owner bragged about how the more he upset his clients and they complained online about him, the better his ranking results got. Google has since put measures in place to deter website owners from using tactics that are intended to manipulate their search engine rankings using bad publicity.

As a result of negative SEO, practitioners have looked at sites that have been banned as a result of bad publicity, and off-page SEO tactics that have drained websites of their ranking. They then learn what techniques to use to target a website that they want to eradicate or demote. They then use these techniques to harm the competition.

Good SEO companies employ Reputation Management as a early warning system that these issues are happening. It also catches when clients or former employees begin a campaign against the company to harm the website or companies reputation online. There are many techniques that can be used to eliminate or reduce the negative effects that these kinds of comments or linking can do to you if caught early enough. Both for the end user and to the search engines.

Several people who work in the SEO industry have consulted with me on a regular basis when their client’s website is under attack from bad commenting, reviews, or other negative SEO practices. Almost every strategy someone can use to demote your website there is a counter strategy to employ to reverse or minimize its effects. In some industries where there is severe competition and we know it is going to happen we employ techniques in advance.

In some cases you know who is doing it. An impossible to please client, a former disgruntled employee, and sometimes it is a current employee who is mad at the company. Other times it is impossible to find out who is carrying out a negative SEO attack because many of the people they have done their research or involved a highly skilled person to help.

This could be another book I write, but if bad Yelp reviews are killing you, you get listed on Rip -Report, Scammers, etc. It is best that you contact me immediately before your business suffers and it is too late to take any action. The sooner you start taking action to reverse this situation the better.

Google or Bing Link Penalties

When you receive a penalty notice from Google, you are instructed to clean up your act and remove any links that may be violating Google's guidelines. Sometimes you have no knowledge of who placed the links and if there is no way to remove them. Luckily you can keep them from hurting by using the Google Disavow Link Tool in Google or Bing's Webmaster Tools.

Link Spamming

To the all-knowing eye, spammy links are easily found. A good SEO company provides links that have the appearance of being an organic and customer or vendor provided link.

Even before social media links had been part of the major search engine’s algorithms, they were there, usually from SEO wannabes that didn’t know any better. Let me warn you now, if you are involved in social media solely for the SEO value of the links from your favourite social media sites – you’re doing it wrong and you are going to eventually meet with a less than favourable outcome.

You are treading in an area where far too many people have already abused this area. So much so that now increasingly savvy community members are OVER-sensitive to it. I have seen legitimate content called SEO spam simply because the user couldn’t find another marketing purpose to apply a name to it.

How can you avoid being called a spammer? Provide GREAT, not just good, content that doesn’t look like your directly advertising the service or product wherever possible. In general, the better your content = the less likely it will be considered spam.

Let’s take a look at different types of spammy content:

· Comment Spam

· Blog Spam

· Viral Marketing

· Being The Self Promoter

· Money Making Spam

Comment Spam

This type of spam needs no description. Comment spam is a major annoyance and made entirely too easy with the advent of Deamon software that auto spams. Blogs, Forums, WordPress websites, Facebook pages, social media bookmarking sites, and the like all have to deal with this kind of spam.

When you go to a website, drop a comment with a link back to your website either by hand, use software, or use a bot that drops a link back to you website you are an offender.

You should never comment unless you have something to add to the conversation. Use links only if it is relevant to the conversation.

Blog Spam

Blog spam is essentially when an unknown blog takes high quality content, like a viral video or images, from elsewhere and hosts it on their blog to attract traffic and attention with content they didn’t create.

A secondary term called LinkJacking is essentially the same thing, only this time, it is well known/high traffic blogs doing it in order to get traffic specifically from social media sites such as Digg or Reddit.

Another difference between blog spamming and Linkjacking is that blog spamming takes multiple pieces of content from various sources to attempt to hide the fact that it is copied and it really spam. Linkjacking usually takes content from a single source and simply adds a unique description so as not to be “duplicate” content.

Blog spamming serves little purpose but to rob the original content producers of credit for their time and effort in creating the content.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is like hitting a “home run” in social media marketing. Having a piece of content go viral gives a number of obvious marketing benefits, especially everyone’s favorite marketing buzz word: branding. That’s why many big brands try to go this route. The problem? It’s becoming harder and harder to achieve. Why? Because it has been done…a LOT. Not only are users becoming more cautious of this type of marketing, but the content’s becoming redundant.

How to avoid this label: Your content must be or look completely genuine, stir up REAL emotions, and strive for originality. It’s easier said than done, but not impossible.

Self Promoter

There’s nothing wrong with the occasional self-promotion here and there. The problem is when your website content is only self-promotion with little other content or educational purpose. Consumers know when you are being self-promoting and not offering to their conversations and it becomes a reason to exit from your online content. When sharing links from your site or blog exclusively and from nowhere else, people consider this spamming. Even if it’s super fantastic, neat-o content, you’re spamming people. Even if your blog has no advertising, marketing or business model: you’re still a spammer.

When you share more than your own product or service, URL, etc., not only are you better received, but others will be more willing to share your content again because they trust what comes from you. Sharing nothing but your own content, is the easiest way to end up in a place like Reddit and reported as a Spammer.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reportthespammers.

Reddit.com is a place people can go to report the good and bad about websites. Now, we have all heard the phrase, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” well the same concept applies right here. More people come to reddit.com to report spammers then they come to remark on how well someone is doing.

Money Making Spam

Most social media users feel if you get paid to submit links to Digg or Reddit, you are a spammer, even if the site(s) you’ve submitted make no money from it. If a site has too many ads, too large a call-to-action, or even too prominent a brand message, it might be considered spam. Even well-known publications have been known to fall victim to this label. The fact is, if someone has something to gain by content being spread then it probably smells of marketing. And if it smells of marketing, than it probably is marketing.

You should limit your call-to-action advertising or comments. If you can, you should always hide your main business objective and first focus on making sure your content is being spread and educational if possible.

Varied Linking Text

Just to give a little history, once webmasters figured out that links helped your rankings, all sorts of abuse started to occur. People started creating ways to beat the system including link farms, massive reciprocal link networks, automatically generated content with automatic links, and automated software that automatically posted to thousands of links on the Internet. Most of these links were never meant for a human visitor to see.

This is where the major search engines began to fight back. They didn’t want junk in their results any more than searchers wanted to see it. Search engines started counting some links more than others, and discounting some links and types of links entirely. Then they started to ban websites for using these practices.

Now, link building is no longer a simple “more equals better” formula and the mathematics behind search results has gotten much more complicated. Meanwhile, the ability to use “right link building” has actually gotten a lot easier.

Vary the anchor text slightly for your links allows your linking to appear natural to the search engines. The text used to link to a webpage should be varied and if possible contain a positive word. So if your keyword is “Dentist”, you might put “Great Sacramento dentist” or “Best Sacramento Dentist” as the anchor text for your keywords.

Sidebar: Getting Good Links

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink (also known as link text). For example, if this were a website, then in this sentence, Uthis would be the anchor textU. You don’t always have control over your anchor text. If someone links to you from their blog, or someone writes an article about you, the writer may not give you “keyword friendly” anchor text. In those cases, just be happy they linked to you. But, in other cases, you may be able to choose your anchor text.

Search engines pay particular attention to the anchor text that they are following. So, for your anchor text, use descriptive keywords and anchor text variants under which you would like to rank and make sure the keyword you are using in your anchor text is linked to a page on your website focused on the same keyword.

Many people make the mistake of making every link to their homepage. This gives your homepage a good ranking but all the other pages on the website suffer.

TIP: Pick up the phone and make a call to the administrators/editors for the website you want a link from. Such a simple concept, and one that’s adopted by virtually every sales organization in the world, and yet the vast majority of link builders out there fail to utilize the phone, instead opting for mountains of emails or heaps of social network messaging.

WordPress Blog Commenting

When commenting on blogs, particularly WordPress blogs, use a keyword phrase in the "name" box and use a 2 to 3% keyword density when commenting on the blogs. That will often result in a backlink to your website for which you have control of the anchor text.

Forum Posting

When posting in forums, include your keywords or phrases as part of your forum signature as well as writing with your keyword in mind at a 4-5% keyword density is another way of encouraging backlinks.