Today’s SEO trick is concerned with links, in case you couldn’t tell by the article title.  Bear in mind that having the same keyword repeated 3 times in the title is probably not good SEO practice.  Sometimes you just need to get your point across!  How about getting 3 tips about SEO and links in one article to make it fair?

  1. Get as many good inbound links as is practical! A link from another page to yours drives traffic to your site.  Links from very good pages are always beneficial, even if they are rarely clicked.  Don’t go overboard trying to get links by spamming unrelated blog comments.  Spam is spam, and your reputation matters.
  2. Most links are nofollow, but just as good! 99% of the time when you are able to link to yourself on blog comments or larger posts, the nofollow tag is added in the html code.  This tells the search engines that the link does not represent any trust in your site.  The cool thing is that nobody else cares, and the link looks and works the same as any regular link!
  3. Links work best when they are unintentional! If you look at the inbound links to your website, you will probably notice that many of them are accidental.  You had nothing to do with getting the link!  This is a good sign that you are generating content worthy of a link, and you should keep doing whatever works for you.

Don’t get too obsessed with inbound links.  It is often very easy to get on the first page of results for major national stories without a single link.  You just need to write articles in a timely fashion and carefully choose your title.  How about some bonus SEO tricks?

  • Temporary links are good too! How about a craigslist ad for yourself that includes a link?  It is probably nofollow, and will disappear within a week or so, but it will always generate some traffic for your site.
  • Forget pagerank! If your are focused on only getting links from high pagerank sites, you are missing out on some great opportunities.  After reading this article, I want you to do the following experiment:  Go over to slashdot.org with its 54 million inbound links, and look at what the pagerank is for the articles on the front page.  Unless some miracle has occurred, the pagerank as shown by your SEO toolbars will be zero!  You need to go pretty far back in time before you see an article with a decent pagerank.  This should tell you something:  You don’t get any pagerank benefit until weeks after people stop reading the article.  So if you want to get a link to yourself on the article now, nobody will see it!  Think about it like earning interest, and try to get links to yourself early.  Go for traffic first, and pagerank later.