There is no doubt that Google will take some heat for the new roll-out. Many Google users are likely to disagree with their private content being shared publicly through the Google+ network. Google could also leverage these search results to favor it’s own content and snuff out competitors.

It will be interesting to see how this new theory affects organic search engine optimization results.

1. Take your time when creating a link-wheel. A good strategy is to add one web 2.0 web article every two days.
2. Use unique content for each article, and link that you set-up.
3. Use your most important keywords for the name of the sister site.
4. Ensure that you take advantage of header, and title tags.
5. Only link to your site from the sister site once.
6. Make sure you use one-way links when connecting your sister sites.
7. Make sure you are not setting up “nofollow” links to your master site.
8. Use atleast one “nofollow” to other content.
9. Submit your RSS feeds from the sister sites to feed aggregators.
10. Be sure to revist your links wheels to update content from time to time.
11. Write down all usernames, passwords, and anchor text that you’ve setup to keep a running list.

The dont’s of building a successful link wheel.

1. Do not build your sister sites all at once, and put them live over an hour or two.
2. DO NOT use the same content over and over. Content is king in this process.
3. Do not use the same sub domain names for every sister site. A good tip is to use singular, plural and consumer search terms.
4. Do use use identical page titles, and headers.
5. Do not link all sister sites to each other. This is a wheel, not a intersection.
6. Do not use 2 way links.
7. Do not use the same anchor text to your master site. Use a variation of 3-4 different terms.
8. Do not close the wheel of links into a full circle. The one nofollow site should be used in every wheel.
9. Do not submit all sites to RSS aggregators at once.
10. DO NOT publish, and forget to revisit your sister sites to add fresh content.

1.    Reach out to your best audience. The most important part of an SEO campaign for your website is to reach the audience that will convert for you. If you know your industry, you should know where the majority of your sales come from.

2.    Converting those visitors. SEO is not only about gathering that big number in traffic. It’s important to get those visitors to do business with you. Installing Analytics and using some other tools will help you to understand who is converting, how they are getting to your pages and so much more.

3.    Build your reputation. Being the best builds trust. If your clients enjoy your products or services, you will most likely start seeing organic inbound links. Happy customers love talking about happy experiences. This also goes both ways, in which scammers are often exposed, and bad business practices receive attention too.

4.    Get to the first page. It’s a proven fact that being in the top 10 search results will increase sales enormously. Survey’s reflect that users don’t even make it to the second of the page 90 percent of the time. Keywords are king!

5.    Research your competition. There are tons of tools and services to help you understand how your competition got to where they are. Mimicking their technique and taking advantage of what they aren’t will help you to overcome obstacles.

6.    SEO defeats Design. Unless you are a web designer, it’s not that important to have a super pretty site. It’s more important to rank well in your SERPs, and get traffic and results. Flash and other extra plugins do not do much for you in terms of Search Engine Optimization.

It’s a common misconception that having more backlinks will automatically give you the boost you are looking for. Not only do you need the inbound links, but you need these inbound links to be quality content driven links. Search engines will evaluate each site and their links to determine the quality. If your website is about convertable, then having a inbound link from a bookstore would carry little quality or advantages to your website.

Backlinks are slowly starting to depreciate due to SEO experts using deceptive tactics like hidden links, or auto generated pages based on other rss feeds. Link farms have caused the entire search engine algorithm to become alot harder to accomplish fast and easy results. Link farms are now frowned upon, and can cause your site to be banned from search querys.

By having quality backlinks you are attracting visitors that may be actually interested in your site, and it’s content. You can’t just throw up a wordpress site and expect traffic to start rolling in. Industries are flooded with websites, and fake content driven domains. It’s becoming more and more important to find help with obtaining the proper backlinks, and article submissions based on your industry or content.

Google has been hard at work, and are constantly adapting their algorithm to help keep black hat marketers off the google sidewalks. They have been developing a way to judge weather a site is trustworthy or not. This means that linking to bad websites may potentially hard your website ranking. To avoid running into issues like this you should constantly evaluate who’s linking to you, and whom you are linking to. We have provided a nice tool to check what other sites are linking to you here.

Using tools are very important when you being considering your backlinking campaign. Keeping track of your backlinks and anchor text can really help show you the results you are obtaining. Again, using our free tool, you can check if who is linking to you with average rating of how well that site stands with google. It’s also a good idea to keep a running excel file of where you place your link, what anchor text you used, and what their page rank is. This is an important tactic so you can go back and check if your links were accepted, and if you’d like to start contributing more to that website.

As I mentioned above, anchor text is an important part in creating quality backlinks to your website. Anchor text is when a link uses a keyword in the text of the hyperlink. Instead of using the standard “Click here” method, it’s a way better tactic to use your keywords, or something related to the page you are directing them too. It’s important to keep track of your anchor text to make sure that you are getting the quality backlink boost you set out to achieve.

I really hope that this article helped clear up some questions with backlinks, anchor text, and basic search engine optimization. If you would like us to help build your backlinks and boost your websites page rank, then please check out our services, or contact us!

The theory is pretty easy to understand once you think about it a little. A network of high ranking websites that all link to each other, and always link back to your main site. This is the most obvious and important way to increase your page rank.

A big mistake I see when listening to other people create link wheels, is they either only make 1 link wheel, or they make 1 link wheel that uses 8 sites. From experience, the best method is to use 4 sites in a link wheel, and create many different links wheels. The anchor text you use within this strategy is very important. There are hundreds of web 2.0 sites that rely on your content. It’s very important to keep building link wheels, and keep those backlinks coming in!

An important tip is to not go overboard on your links within your link wheeling pages. Too often do I see a sister page carry up to 10 links pointing to pages of your site. I think it’s key to have various results for each part of the wheel. Don’t go overboard or these web 2.0 sites may delete your article. Creating 2-4 links on your page should be sufficient enough. It’s also a good idea to use news feeders on some of these sites. I usually tend to re-create my articles slightly so it either shows a teaser of information or is just a completely re-written article of what the main website says.

Below are two graphic examples of how a link wheel could work. These are the most obvious web 2.0 sites to build your first strategy with. If you would like ongoing link building services, please check out our services.

Backlink Checking Tool

This tool will scan the web for all incoming links to your website or URL. It’s free and unlimited to use but please do not abuse it.  (*cough* spammers and robots) The backlink checking tool uses both Google and Yahoo services to help determine all the incoming links. These links are also displayed with a Rank score. Since Google has limited access to their page rank checking tool, we developed a different method to determine how important the page is. The rank is developed by applying a logarithmic method that uses Alexa Rank, the calculation of web pages currently on the web, and the number of pages that are linking to Google. Obviously this calculation is just an average, but does work well in determining what is important and what’s not. With Google not announcing or showing signs of public page rank updates, this was obviously the best route to go.  If you have any questions regarding the actual variables used, then please contact us.

XML Site Map Generator

The next free tool we offer is a XML site-map generator. This is pretty self explainatory. It will create .xml code for you to use with Google Webmaster Tools. There are no limitations to using this script, unlike many other people offering free site-map generators. This should be a real time saver to anyone that may be manually doing this still! haha. If you have any questions, again please contact us.

Hi guys!

The PageRank which we use internally is continuously updated, so even if you’re not seeing a PageRank in your Toolbar, rest assured that we’ll be treating your site accordingly regardless, and will crawl, index and rank your websites appropriately.

We do update the Toolbar PageRank regularly, even if that’s not as regularly as some of you wish. I agree that it would be nice to have it updated more frequently. Given the time since the last update, I imagine you’ll start seeing another one in the near future.

That said, keep in mind that Toolbar PageRank is just one metric on the web — there are many others that can be used. If you’re trying to sell advertising (using nofollow links, of course), why not take a look at the Google Ad Planner ( https://www.google.com/adplanner/ ) instead of focusing on Toolbar PageRank. It provides a much more detailed view of the traffic, the users and their interests. As a publisher, you can add your Webmaster Tools verified sites to Ad Planner, optionally linking your Analytics data in there as well. It provides a pretty good view of the audience of your website, and makes it much more interesting to advertisers than a simple “PR” number.

There are also other similar tools that offer a third-party view into your sites’ metrics, be it Alexa, Compete, etc. If you want to make a good case for potential advertisers, these kinds of metrics are useful because they are much more fine-grained than Toolbar PageRank. Advertisers don’t want to buy ads, they want to promote their products/services to interested people (not to the Toolbar) and ultimately make a profit by selling something .

He then follows up with

As Luzie mentioned, we have been updating the Toolbar PageRank (also since April), though it’s possible that you don’t see it for every URL/site.

Obviously seeing so many reports is a bit odd — I’ve passed your feedback on to the team here to review. At this time, we are not planning on removing the Toolbar PageRank. It’s an important signal for us (but again, it’s one out of hundreds of signals), so I think it’s good to expose some of that to users. As a webmaster, I think it’s an interesting metric, but overall it really shouldn’t be a goal.

One thing to keep in mind is that PageRank is based on the URL, not the site. Additionally, it’s possible that technical changes on your site (or on Google’s view of your site) can impact PageRank — for instance, if your site’s URLs move from one domain to another, if we choose a different canonical URL for indexing your homepage, or if pages from your site drop out of the search results for various reasons (downtime, getting hacked, full of … spam — hopefully not yours ). These technical issues can happen over time (one way to safeguard against some of them is to make sure that your site uses proper canonicalization techniques from the start). Our systems are generally quite good at recognizing and reacting to them, but you might see the reactions as fluctuations in Toolbar PageRank, even if it doesn’t impact your site’s crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Hope this helps a bit,

Cheers
John

Hopefully this will help clear up some unanswered questions and worries for all of those that rely so much on the PR toolbar to sell their links. You can find the original messages here.

The biggest reason for a website not ranking well is that it hasn’t been optimized for your keywords. Before you setup your website you should do some research on keywords and ensure that these keywords are placed correctly within your website content. There are tons of free online tools to help you figure out keyword ratios, and monthly searches.

#2 – You have picked out keywords that are overused.

A more common reason for not ranking well with google is that you have picked out keywords that are way to overused. This is most common when your site is new and you have not built very many links to it. The worst part about this is that when the average person searches, they very rarely make it to the 3rd page before moving elsewhere. The numbers don’t lie! It’s better to get on page 1 on a term that is getting 5,000 searches a month versus being on page 10 with 10,000 serches a month. Before going overboard with your keyword, it’s a good idea to do the research behind it.

#3 – You do not have enough backlinks.

The number of people linking to your site and  the quality of those sites help determine your PageRank. This is a very important factor in where google places you, and how important they think you are. If you are not ranking well, a good practice is to check out your competitors. Go find you 5 biggest competitors and do the research on how they are obtaining such good results. You will most likely find that they have 100’s of nice quality sites linking to them. This is a time consuming but very worthwhile approach to obtaining the results you want.

#4 – You site has errors and is not being crawled correctly.

You should make it a common practice to validate your websites with the W3C. Most websites have HTML errors, and it’s not the biggest deal, but you always want browser compatibility and usability to be on your side. In some very bad coding situations, a google spider may stop crawling your page since there are so many errors. Creating a google webmasters account will help locate and fix these errors. Google calls them “Crawl Errors”. I’ve had certain instances where my websites were correctly validated, but Google did not like a 3rd party service I was using. I’ve had google stop crawling my page because a Online chat program was taking too long to load, and it never got to the footer of my page! These are just a few things to watch out for.

#5 – You are not being patient

It takes time to get the results you want. If your site is new, and your main keyword is very competitive, then it will take a lot of catch up work. The big mistake many website owners make are purchasing backlinks. It’s against the google policy and it’s very obvious to catch onto. The best way to do SEO is the hard earned way. Remember it may take months to get to where you want, but it only takes a few minutes for google to blacklist you and put you at the bottom for good.

When people think or Google PageRank, they mistake the word page to be their webpage. PageRank is really named after Larry Page, the man behind PR’s algorithm. Google assigns a numerical weight to every website. This weight is to measure each site’s importance among its competitors.

Though PageRank is Googles trademark, it was not patented by them. Stanford University is the powerhouse behind this creation. Google purchased the PageRank patient from Stanford University for $336 Million. This is just one example of how much money Google has to throw around!

Why 336 million dollars you ask? Well it’s a very advanced algorithm with over 500 million variables, and 3 billion terms. I like to think with this many variables, that the 336 million dollar payout was a very good deal for Google. Not to mention, the very best of SEO organizations still have not figured out the formula. Everyone just comes to the basic conclusion that the higher the PR, the better off your website is.

PageRank is no doubt the most popular measurement of website popularity these days. I can’t imagine any other measurement tool creating millions of variables and terms just to surpass an already solid algorithm.