Apr 06 2010

Coming up with unique and interesting ways to build links is an ongoing challenge for most SEO’s.  We sometimes take on clients that are in industries that are not very interesting, but none the less, they still need links.  So the challenge arises, how do we get people to link to this site when it’s in such a boring industry?

Below are 3 of the hottest, newest, coolest link building strategies for 2010!

1.  Infographs or Infographics

If you’re not familiar with infographs, they basically represent data in a visual format.  A couple of sites that have taken this strategy and ran with it include: Mint.com & CreditLoan.com.  These infographs can send massive amounts of traffic and get you hundreds if not thousands of backlinks, but they have to be well executed.  Be aware that the initial traffic you get will be social media traffic, which typically doesn’t convert well for most industries.  But the strategy with infographs is links!

2. Trends

Trends are hot in every industry.  People love to know what’s going on, what’s coming up and what others are doing.  Smashing Magazine does an excellent job of this as seen in their “Web Design Trends for 2009“.   This type of content works well for building backlinks because its rich in content, uses images to tell the story, is well structured and it also gives credit to others in the industry.  I know if I was a designer and Smashing Magazine linked to me I’d probably blog about or atleast shoot out a Tweet to let my friends know.  As you can see, this post got them over 200 comments and over 5,000 backlinks.

3. Extended Research

Doing extended research on any one topic can reveal all kinds of facts and statistics that you’re most likely not aware of.  Simply compiling such information can make for linkbait content, but let’s go a bit further with it and truly make it linkable.  If you don’t want to do the research yourself put together a process and post it on Mechanical Turk.  If you don’t want do create the graphics post a job on Elance or oDesk.  Becoming THE source of information is a sure way to get links.

Conclusion

There are countless ways to build links, but with some creativity and know how, anyone can create linkable content.  I challenge you to push the boundaries of link building to come up with new and creative ways of getting those links.  Knowing what others are doing is a double edge sword, you’ll either adapt their techniques or take note of what they’re doing and push yourself to find better ways.  I choose the latter.

- Marko Nikolic

With the recent merge of Bing and Yahoo a lot of SEO’s will be carefully dissecting data to better understand what major factors affect the Bing search results and how those factors compare to how Google ranks websites. It only makes sense that this is done, search volume will inevitably increase in Bing and you will want to be on top of it.

In order to better comprehend how Bing and Google rank sites I compared the keyword home remodeling, and explored various SEO factors that might influence this keywords positioning.

Domain Trust
Comparing the domain trust for each website we can easily see that DoItYourself.com has a much higher trust over LetsRenovate.com. This is probably the first indication and biggest reason why Google has ranked this website number one over LetsRenovate.com.

On Page Factors
Looking at the on page factors, it’s very evident that DoItYourself.com is relying on domain trust for its rankings. The only related keyword in their title tag is Home, compared to LetsRenovate.com who is using the full keyword Home Remodeling. You can also see that DoItYourself.com does not use the exact keyword home remodeling anywhere on the homepage, this again reinforces the fact that their domain authority is high and that is the main factor they are relying on.

Now, the keyword in question, home remodeling, can be broken up into two keywords, home and remodeling. Let’s take a look at each site and how it is using these keywords separate from one another.

As you can see, LetsRenovate.com is using both keywords much heavier and in a lot more places.

Off Page Factors
Backlinks will always be a huge part of any Search Engine Optimization strategy but when it comes to Bing, it’s not really THAT big of a deal. LetsRenovate.com is ranking for a highly searched keyword but is not harnessing many backlinks to do it.

Before getting into the Top 5 Bing SEO Tips, I will assume you’re doing most of the standard on page SEO stuff like a unique title tag, meta description, H1, H2, H3’s, etc… Now that you know what main factors are influencing the Bing search results, I will cover the 5 Unique SEO Tips to get you to the top of Bing.

1. Meta Keywords – Using the meta keywords tag is something that is not heavily emphasized in the SEO world but looking at a lot of the websites that rank in Bing you will see that they are used.

2. Bold Keywords – It has been shown that bolding keywords tells search engines to put a slightly larger emphasis on that keyword. Having looked at quite a few search results in Bing, many of the pages that were near the top utilized this method.

3. Image Alt Tag – Adding image alt tags has long been used for SEO but it seems that it is more important in Bing then Google. Most of the websites I looked at were utilizing the image alt tag well and thus were ranking higher in Bing.

4. Keyword Density – In general, Bing seems to like a keyword density of 4-6%. Not to say I didn’t find websites that ranked with a much lower and much higher percentage, but overall, the top websites seemed to fall in that range.

5. Domain Age – The older the domain, the better. This is a common positive factor for any website but it holds especially true in Bing.

Well, there you have it! 5 Unique SEO Tips to get you to the top of Bing.

- Marko

You should put the title of the posting in the main ad too - not just in the title field - and you must put it between h1 tags. This will give your ad a huge edge in the search engines.

Craigslist automatically puts the title in the TITLE field between h2 tags, but that is not enough if you want to get ahead in a competitive industry: you need to put your own h1 title in the main body IN ADDITION to the one in the title field.

With BackPage you should do the opposite: Put an h2 title in the main body, because BackPage puts the title in the TITLE field in h1 tags (surely a more logical approach than that of Craigslist.)

More generally, you should use classical SEO principles when producing your ad copy, and take full advantage of the HTML that Craigslist allows: bold, italics, underline, etc.

This will ensure that your ad’s appearance on Google’s first page will be by design rather than by accident.