Get Free Sitewide Links the Easy Way

Much of successful SEO is a matter of developing inbound links to your sites.  As such, you can imagine just how powerful a sitewide link from a reguarly-visited, high-PR site can be to your SEO efforts.

Well, it’s possible to get those sitewide links without spending a dime and the process is actually incredibly easy.  If you’re ready to make a handful of blog comments, you can create a powerhouse set of sitewide links quickly.

It all starts with a popular plug-in that many bloggers use.  It’s a “top commenters” blogger and it was designed to encourage people to participate via comments with a blog.  It creates a list on the blog’s sidebar that features the “names” of those who’ve commented on the blog with the greatest frequency.

So, you need to find blogs that use this plug-in and assess how much effort it will take to break into the list of top commenters.  Then, you simply write enough comments to get on the list.  Boom.  Your “name” (which in many cases can actually be your preferred anchor text) with a live link will appear on every single post and page on the entire blog! 

Here are a few hints to get you started…

Don’t try to move to the number one slot right away.  Build your comments over a period of days or weeks.  If you suddenly dump 20 comments on a blog, it’s going to raise some suspicions that you’re merely trying to game the system.

Do write good comments.  ”I love this post!” isn’t going to cut the mustard.  If Askimet doens’t capture that as spam, the webmaster probably will.

Do check regularly.  You don’t want to fall of the list, so keep an eye on the blog to make sure that you’re not in danger of losing your slot.

This is an easy way to get a sitewide link and it’s amazing how little work it actually takes in so many cases.  Improve your SEO efforts today.  Start by using a Google search (keyword +”TopCommenter”) to find blogs in your niche that you can comment upon for to your advantage.

Is Google Taking Another Look at Directory Links? Change is a Constant.

If there’s one thing you can count on in the world of search engine optimization, it’s change.  What works this year might be useless next year.  Sure, there are a few things you can do that should always work (great content, frequent updating, etc.), but everything else is subject to change.

Take linking, for example.  Links have long been the lifeblood of good off-site SEO and that’s unlikely to change any time soon.  The way search engines evaluate inbound links to your site, however, is subject to change.  The engines have long been trying to perfect the way they evaluate links to insure that they’re legitimate “votes of confidence” for your site and that has made several old-school strategies just as useless as excessive keyword stuffing.  Thing “FFA link pages” and you’ll understand just how different things are today from where they were a few years ago.

We might be witnessing another change right now.

If you looked at the Google webmaster guidelines a few months ago, you’d see that Google recommended submitting your site to pertinent directories.  Google has long relied on DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) and other directory links to help determine the way it ranks sites.

That’s led many webmasters to submit their sites to a wide variety of directories in pursuit of inbound links.  It’s a popular strategy and there are literally thousands of directories out there who are willing to offer a link to almost any submitted site.  

Google, however, has made a change.  That line about submitting your site to directories?  It’s gone.  They removed it from their webmaster guidelines.  As a result, many in the SEO biz are arguing that Google may be devaluing all of those directory links floating around out there.  Paid directories themselves are falling off in rank.  

Although those who claim Google has never valued many of the “lower quality” directories in the first place, it is possible that we’re witnessing another change in how the search engines will be treating the currency of SEO, inbound links.

Too Much of a Good Thing? Overdoing SEO

Good SEO requires more than just a commitment and a work ethic. In fact, too much work in certain areas can actually do more harm than good. We tend to naturally embrace the notion that “more is better” but when it comes to optimizing your site for search engine performance there are times when it pays to back off a little bit.

The most obvious proof of that theory becomes obvious when you look at the old-school SEO technique of keyword stuffing. If you’ve been online for more than a few years, you can probably remember those sites with “hidden” keywords designed to attract search engine attention. That kind of stuff actually worked, too. Now, however, it’s a recipe guaranteed to put you on Google’s bad side. That’s why the keystuffing era is history.

There are some practices used today that will suffer from overkill. One of them involves the use of anchor text in inbound links to your site. People doling out the SEO advice will often tell you that the right anchor text is a great idea. What they fail to mention is the fact that too many backlinks featuring the exact same anchor text will raise a flag at Google. It looks automated and may make Google wonder if you really “deserve” all of those votes of confidence. That’s why too much of the same anchor text is a mistake. You need to mix it up.

Another example is the use of bold texting. This on-page SEO technique can work. The search engines do notice those <b> and </b> tags and they take notice of what rests between them. However, you dillute the value of bolding when you toss it around too much. You also give yourself away if you’re bolding every single instance of a keyword. This is another great place for SEO moderation.

You can do too much of a good thing. Bolding, anchor text and keyword stuffing all prove that the best SEO involves knowing when to put the pedal to the metal and when to slow down.