Persistance: If you do not give up quickly, they will come

There is no such thing as overnight SEO or instant SEO.  No matter what some poeple try to say, I have not seen any “successful” SEO ventures result from the tactics that state they are going to get you results overnight.  The way to get long term search engine visibility is through persistent high quality activity.

Six years ago I was introduced to the idea of running a marathon.  At the time, I thought, “Sure, I’m in decent shape, all I need to do is just keep running until I finish.”  This mentality is of course easier said than done.  Your bodies just aren’t naturally ready to run 26.2 miles without having some training.  My first marathon I ran was a true test to my will to persist through difficult times.  I had not properly trained for the event.  The most miles I had ever run in my life leading up to the day was 10, and that was only once, and it was not a pleasant experience.

It was the L.A. Marathon of 2007.  It was a hot day.  And I felt it.  By mile 13, my body was still feeling good.  I got a false sense that I was half way done, and was still feeling good.

All of a sudden, at mile 18 things changed.   My body really started to hurt and started telling me to stop.  I had never felt this sort of feeling before.  So many thoughts rushed to me, “It’s too hot, you need some water.  You still have 8 miles, that is too long to finish.  I think I may have injured a muscle.  I just can’t make it.”  But what you learn about yourself on marathon days is you can persist.  Even though you are hurting.  Even though it is extremely tough, you can persist and finish the marathon.

Successful SEOs likely have the mental fortitude required to complete a marathon even when their bodies tell them to stop. In the SEO world, there will be times where it will be difficult to continue.  You will not be seeing quick results.  Curve balls will come and rankings will change.  But if you continue to take the proper steps daily to improve, the point will come where it is a lot easier.  Persistence in SEO is an absolute must.

Adventurous: Willing to Try New Things

There are many theories out there on the best steps to take to raise your rankings in the search engines.  Some of them are no brainers tried and true, like creating high quality content, creating lots of high quality content, creating targeted titles on your web page, and getting backlinks.

However, not all SEO experts agree on every tactic available.  For many years I completely avoided social media with my SEO tactics.  I had so much success without them, I did not want to force any of my clients to have to go that route.  In 2013, this has certainly changed.  If you do not have at least one social media location connected with your website, you are missing out on some easy SEO potential.  Not every social media tactic works, but trying new options within this realm is starting to prove very beneficial.

There are many strategies on the black hat side of SEO that can help to gain and advantage in the market.  However, my thought on this is in the long run, if you are going about your SEO strategy with an idea that you are trying to do less, produce lower quality, and outrank, you will ultimately get sniffed out.  Now that bounce rate is playing a larger role in your continued rankings over time, visitors are telling the story whether your site is important.  You can try new things, but make sure you are also consistenly maintaining high standards of quality.

Be sure to research strategies before implementing.  Don’t just take any random blog post you read and think whatever it says is absolute truth.  Do some research.  Make sure new strategies are in fact good strategies.  Sometimes, you simply have to be willing to try new things.  I personally am not big on trying new things without first going through some extensive research.

Being Thorough

One of my favorite traits of top SEOs is how thorough they become in their craft.  If you think about how much is involved in raising your search engine rankings, it can sometimes get a bit overwhelming to manage it all.

Just take the example of one of my favorite SEO tips, linking within the content of your website to other content.  Quite simply, that means you are pointing key texts within your content to other relevant content (on your site and off your site).  Google simply loves to see links, especially when you are relating content on your website through links.  This task, while very important to your SEO growth, is one of the most tedious and time consuming.  To create your internal links you have to have a deep knowledge of your own content on your site to know where to link to.  Then you have to locate all the proper links and enter them within the related content on each page.  In addition, as new content is created, it is even valuable to go back to old content and add links to your newly created content to further enhance your internal link building structure.

When I create a blog post, I usually spend around 2  to 4 hours creating the content, and then 1 to 2 hours adding proper links throughout the post.  It becomes extra difficult because once you are “done” with the writing phase, you are excited and ready to post to your blog right away.  But proper content creation simply isn’t “done” until links are created, photos are added, and all the additional design aspect are finalized.  For me, it helps to ensure you have the proper time allotted prior to writing content for your website.  Allot enough time to compose the content (if that includes research) and then allot enough time to properly prepare the content for display.

You can quickly see how having a thorough mentality will help in the quality of this process.

Patience

Just like being thorough, many top SEO consultants are extremely patient.  The difference between the SEO plan and the adwords plan is the difference between a sprint and a marathon.  Your SEO results are not expected to occur instantly.  For low competition links, you can expect to rank well in 3 months.  For high competition, it is more likely a years time to really see some good results

Patience is so important because you will be tempted to get out of your rhythm after seeing little results in highly competitive markets.  If you can just know that smart efforts will work, that Google will reward consistently good content and consistently strong link building, it becomes much easier to continue with your strategy.

I equate our SEO strategies to planting a garden. When you first start “planting”, you are learning everything from scratch.  You have to learn the proper tools to use.  You have to learn the proper fertilizer to get your plants the correct nutrition they need to grow and flourish.  You need to understand the proper amount of sunlight your plants require.  And you simply can’t neglect watering them.

The same is true for your website.  Initially many of the ideas about building a buisiness online may seem foreign.  You are not familiar with the business building tools available to you online.  But over time, you start to learn which tools assist your process and become invaluable parts of your online business process.

You learn to fertilize your websites with the basic needs all websites should have.  A clean design that doesn’t turn users away.  A slick logo that invites company branding.  A content management system setup that allows for the most development potential.

You learn to give your website the proper amount of sunlight by connecting with other like-minded individuals in your niche or space to provide backlinks and shine light on your growing website.

As an SEO, be sure to take a step back and think what search engines are trying to offer their users.   They want to offer their users the perfect answer to the question users are asking.   If you approach you content creation with this in mind, and then take your persistant, adventurous, thorough, and patient mind site along for the ride, you will have little problem seeing success.  It will just be a matter of time.

About one year ago one of our short term SEO clients decided they were going to stop paying for SEO services.  They had some unexpected fees come their way which made them have to tighten their wallet in a number of areas.   This client had only been performing SEO services for 3 months.  I just did a quick review of the work we had done over a year ago to get them started in their first three months.  Sure, SEO has changed since the end of 2011 and early 2012.  The actions we now take to improve search engine rankings are not the same as what we did then.  However, in over a years time, even without any adjustments or changes to their website in any way, they are still ranking very will in all of their main keyword phrases except for one.  No more payments to us, no more updates to their website.  Just reaping continued benefits.

What does this tell us?  How can we repeat to always have our SEO efforts stick even after we stop updating?

First, it tells us that our approach is (as we expected) in line with what search engines want.  We focus first on expanding customer’s content, targeting specific key phrases that are relevant to their business and relevant to the users they target.  We create high quality content around these phrases and optimize the page layout and display.

We earn extra backlinks to these pages and build supporting tier 3 pages to boost the power of the main tier level 2 pages we are trying to rank for.

Through monthly iterations, this process appears to Google extremely natural in development, and therefore is often long lasting.  However, what is most important in 2013 for keeping your SEO work on top of google rankings is to make sure your visitor is not leaving your page instantly upon arrival.  This is referred to as your bounce rate.

While google does not state that they use this to make adjustment, it is clear in our experience that pages with high bounce rate get flagged by google and often drop in rankings very easilily.  Pages with low bounce rates (compared to others in the same space) will often jump in the rankings.  Why?  This is google’s clue that people that happened to visit this page are liking what they are seeing.

The best way to keep people on your page without triggering a bounceback:

1. Answer the question they are seeking for the answer for.  Users are smart.  If they come to a page that doesn’t instantly give them the answer or show them what they are expecting to see, they are off to the next page.  There are an abundance of websites out there and all fighting for eyes to come to their page.  If you have done the hard work to get your site ranking for google, the least you can do is provide your visitors what they need when they come.
2. Keep your hosting up to par. Slow websites are completely detrimental to your SEO.  While google only takes a small consideration to slow page load speeds, users will bounce instantly if pages do not load instantly.  Keep your website running fast to keep your bounce rate low.
3. Organize your content.  If you have a lot of content to share to users, organize it in a way that makes sense, but also works well for search engines.  How many times do you find yourself searching through 2,000 word articles to find one paragraph answering the question your are searching to answer?  Probably not too often.
4. Mix and repeat.  Don’t be afraid to re-iterrate important points across your website in multiple ways and in multiple areas.  Its not fluffing up your website, but rather it is giving more opportunities to answer slightly different questions.

SEO is our passion.  However, it doesn’t have to be your passion to be successful in building a business that thrives in search engine rankings.  If you want to give your website a boost, try signing up for our free email course that inspires you to the proper changes to boost your rankings in google over the course of one year.  Be ready, the first few months require some effort.  Then it is just a matter of following our monthly recommended solutions to cruise into new visitors each month.

Wow, this is a steal!  $5.99 for ssl certificates.  Sure its the basic ssl certificate available, but this is perfect for most situations!

Getting that one Kiss

This weekend I heard this story that hit me in a way I’m sure the speaker didn’t intend for it to hit me.  He mentioned a story I had not heard before of a young man experimenting with an idea.  This young man, a student in college, decided to walk around campus and approach any woman he saw and attempt to get a kiss from them.

After marching around campus and asking woman after woman, he experienced many different responses.  Some politely said, “No thank you.”  Many took offense to the question and simply exclaimed, “No!”  Others were so incensed that they literally slapped him across the face.

However, after 97 failures to get a kiss from a random woman on campus, he finally approached one woman that agreed to the proposal and offered him that kiss.

Was this a success?

Is it all about reaching the one potential ‘victim’ or customer?

What happens with other 97 women that were approached by this person? 

Sure, through his spamming technique, he was able to obtain his short term goal of obtaining a kiss from a girl.  But if his long term goal was to increase the amount of people he had serious relationships with, he has increase that number by zero.  If his long term goal was to get a new girlfriend, not only is his number likely zero in the short term, in the long term, he probably hurt his chances from ever connecting with anyone that he approached, or anyone that is even remotely connected to these women he approached.  His “legendary name” will preceed him, and he has now given his name a negative connotation to most females.

Spam Marketing

The idea of spam marketing or mass marketing (though much less intrusive than asking for a kiss), can many times have similar effects.  Your intended audience has little to no relationship with you and in some cases you are asking them to do more than offer a simple kiss, you are asking them to expose  some of their most valued possessions, their contact information and email addresses, their wallets for purchasing, or even simply their time to view your marketing materials.

Do you believe in your product or service so strongly that you would think everyone should be experiencing it?

Why not take a better approach to your marketing?  One that initiates not only a more approachable first meeting, but fosters a long term relationship with your potential customer.

Rather than sending a spam message to all contacts you can obtain, why not create a content rich website that allows those who are looking for what you are offering a chance to find it?

Instead of blasting another low value message to tons of emails, why to create a high quality post that displays your unique way of thinking, or your unique product in a different light.

With a uniquely developed website rich in content, you have a much higher probability of getting a rich audience that is highly targeted and interested in what you are talking about.   It is at that point that you can expect to gain new email contacts that want to know what you are talking about, and want to hear what you have to say, and are much more open to the idea of having that ‘first kiss’.

Instead of spamming thousands of emails with content that lowers your brand value, spam your website with valuable content that increases the trust of your readers and increase your authority in your space to search engines and social media sharers.

In the online business world, there are many ways to get things done and be successful.  I have been on both sides of the spectrum where I don’t want to pay or don’t want to learn about a specific tool that may help me be more productive in my business venture.  I have also been on the other side where I have paid for exactly what I needed after doing the research and finding the exact right tool that can free me up to let my online business flourish.  What I have learned is finding the right tools to help you perform tasks in your business to be more productive, less busy, and have more free time to be creative is what will keep you from getting burned out and ultimately see the most successful growth.

Tools in My Garden

So I was doing some springtime gardening the other day – I can’t believe those words are even being typed from my desk – and I decided to convert our flowerbed (that had been sitting empty for over a year) into something that would actually be a bit more appealing.  Note: the flowerbed is in my backyard so we really don’t have a lot of people that are viewing it on a day to day basis.  It is really only in a position that we would be viewing. Thus the reason why it had been sitting vacant for over a year since we had moved in to the home.

The other reason it had been sitting empty without any planned growth (other than weeds and seasonal grass) was I didn’t have any tools to plant with.  I was sort of forced into the decision to clean out the flower bed and plant something in there when my wife put together a potluck where many of our friends would be visiting and seeing our empty space of dirt.

As is the case when you don’t really want to do something, but know you need to, I put off taking care of the planting until the day before the event.  I didn’t think it was a big deal, I mean it can’t really be that hard to plant some little pre-grown flowers that they sell at Home Depot.

So I went out to buy some little flowers and a few cactus like plants that might last a little longer if I slack on watering.  But what I didn’t buy was a little shovel or anything to stir up the dirt with.  If any of you live in the Southern California area, you will note that if you have an area of dirt that is not manicured or taken care of, it becomes extremely solid and difficult to dig in.  Besides the scare of earthquakes, the hard dirt is the reason that we don’t have any basements in Cali.

So without the digging tools, I simply used some gloves and my hands to create little holes to put the flowers.  Lucky for me I could manage this just enough for the flowers I bought since they were so small that they only needed a few inches of a hole to get properly seeded.

Fast forward a few weeks.  My sister-in-law saw my flower bed, bare as can be with only a few small flowers in it, and decided to give me something a bit nicer to grow.  She gave me some tomatoes and sweet corn which I am actually really excited to try to grow and taste.  However, the size of the plants were big enough that I knew I couldn’t just use my hands for this process.  It was time to head to the store to get some tools.

I came back with a small shovel and a rake like tool that stirs up the earth.  And wouldn’t you know it, planting these larger corn and tomato plants was extremely easy.  In about 20 minutes, I had planted what would have taken me about 2 hours to complete by hand.  Not saying that they have thriving and producing vegetables yet, but at least my small “garden” looks decently complete.

Correlation to the Online Business Development World

This gardening without tools and with tools process reminded me about how important some basic tools can change things even in the online world.  If you think about the blogging world, having a basic tool like a content management system makes the process of blogging very easy and painless.  If you compare what someone would do to create a blog without a wordpress as compared to when they actually switched to implement things to a wordpress, they would surely be overjoyed with the new amount of time they would be saving.

In the SEO world, I know when many people first start out they are trying to do all of the their SEO strategies by hand.   They try to do all the link building by hand. They try to keep up with their keyword research all by hand.

Just like buying a simple set of garden tools, it often makes all the sense in the world to leverage the advantages that the right tools can bring.  Often they can help your online business grow and save you time in the process.  The right tools can free you up to do more great things and spend more of your time being creative, rather than being forced to spend all your time doing business building tasks.

Our Business Development List

You can see a list of some of our favorite online business building tools.  If you have others that you like to use and want to share, please leave a comment below.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been inspired to create a new session of posts that will open my seo writing up to a new world.  A new world in which I am including personal stories and lessons learned through past experiences to help train others in their SEO work.  My ultimate reason for doing this is to help others to reach their goals for their online business.  For today, I am focusing on the basic understanding for why SEO is important.  Quite simply, without an understanding of what search engine optimization can do for your website, you may be ultimately wasting your website’s true potential.  As has been said, one of the greatest tragedies and wastes in life is to have so much potential that remains untapped.   While this may have been referencing you personal life’s potential, the same idea can spill over onto your website.

In the web world, one of the greatest tragedies and wastes is missing out on untapped potential that SEO could likely resolve.

Why Content Could be Your Hidden SEO Potential

Two years ago I was introduced through a friend to a company that needed a fresh update done to their website.  After meeting with the potential client and talking about their needs, I was finding out more and more that their focus was set on the wrong thing.  They were focusing on having a design that was over the top beautiful with all the special addons that they thought would make the site visually appealing.  The were focused on making the appearance of their website look aesthetically appealing, but lost track of what a user would actually do on their website.  As a local physicians clinic, their daily activities were focused on finding out out what their patient’s need and then seeing how they can help them.  Their goals for their website were not aligning with this daily business plan.  They were completely missing out on what patients needed to do when visiting their website.

After discussing things with the clinic, I recommended that we spend partial amount of their website budget on re-design, but put some extra focus into flushing out content that users are going to be looking for on their website.  As I have previously mentioned, a full website with a lot of quality content related to what you do is an absolute must in order to be noted as an authority for search engines.

After flushing out the content throughout their website, making it easy to find and navigate, we set up a system for which they would be able to post new content regarding tips or events weekly keeping their patients returning and giving more reasons for search engines to want to send their potential new clients to their website.

Adding New Content Weekly

After 2 years of semi-consistently sticking with adding new content, the clinic has seen substantial growth in their new visitors and has seen a higher rate of repeat visitors.  In some of their most important keywords, they went from being on the second page of google to being the very first result.  Sure the redesign included some on page optimization tactics, but the push from being 5th to first was all done from new content weekly and monthly.

This particular clinic learned that their website’s potential was lacking one main thing, a deep amount of content, and content directed specifically to their patient’s needs.  Once their realized this, their hidden potential was far less absent.

My Experience

Over my 12+ years of developing and maintaining website for clients and my entrepreneur ideas, I have learned one important fact, if your website is not getting seen by the people that need to see it, your website is wasting its potential.  Time and time again I have worked on creating new and updated website from people that think the reason their website is not getting found by new clients is because they don’t have the latest designs incorporated into their layout.  They think that since their website has a dated look, that that is the reason they are not experience success from their site.

The truth is many highly successful websites do not have fancy designs or all the bells and whistles.  There are many websites with very basic designs that simply offer great content that is what their visitors are looking for, and have therefore continued to be of value year in and year out.  When you focus on trying to be the latest design, you are going to get outdated as time passes.  If you instead focus on trying to have the best content in your niche, you will see that your value will continue to increase with age.

SEO Tip to maximizing your website potential: FOCUS FIRST ON YOUR CONTENT

A Note About Me

This weekend I hosted my first grass volleyball tournament of the season.  While I am located in southern California, the heart of beach and grass volleyball, where I am actually located 1.5 hours inland from the coast in the IE there are actually very few tournaments to be found.  So, I started meeting more and more people that play in the area, and finally decided that since no one else is doing it, I’m going to make it happen.  Running these tournaments does require a lot of work and for me, it was a step away from my comfort zone of simply playing in  competitive competition to running the competition events.

However, I have committed to making this happen because of the though of missing out on a possible hidden potential for myself and a potential for the community have these volleyball events available to them.  For my possible hidden potential, it is a test and discovery to see how comfortable I am with organizing the events, planning for all the hidden issues or problems that may arise and then resolving any instant troubles that we may encounter.  It is a circumstance I rarely put myself in, and for the most part the event felt to go on without a hitch.

I note this along side today’s blog for one reason, if you feel inspired to act on something, ask yourself, why am I not doing it?  Over the past few years, I kept feeling inspired to make these events happen.  For a long time, I just kept putting it off until another day.  Well, if I kept putting it off until another day, the events would never happen.  So at some point, you simply have to say, am I going to waste this potential gem, or am I going to act on it?  If I fail, I have learned more about myself.  If I succeed, I can enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Actionable for Today

If you trust your instincts, there is no reason to wait to do tomorrow what you can get done today!  Is there a blog post you have been wanting to write recently but have been putting it off, give yourself an hour or two block each week to write.  You would be amazed at what you learn about your clients and yourself simply by setting aside some time to write content for your website weekly.

The learning experience also is your first and probably most important step to dominating your niche space.

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Ultimately, it has been my life experiences and personality traits that have added a significant amount of influence on my success in the online business world.  My new change to the blog and to the online world is that I will now be including these details within the realm of effect it has played on my business growth.  I hope to create a complete picture in order to help make your business venture a success.  Everyone is different and so are SEO strategies.  My goal is to specify my strategy and distinguish why it is effective for my in my walk of life.

What do I mean?

3 years ago I started this blog.  Initially I started the blog for one main reason, to grow my SEO strength and authority in my niche.  I teach this and train my clients on how to incorporate blog posting to strengthen SEO every day, so I decided to devote some extra time into doing this myself.  And truthfully, there is no surprise that I have seen my SEO visibility continue to grow month to month on a variety of topics I have discussed in past posts.

However, in 3 years of blogging, I have purposefully kept personal life and business aspects very separate.   I chose to specifically write on topics that could be discussed from a business standpoint and did not include personal or real world examples I have encountered.   For example: I have specifically left out details on SEO growth that may involve certain personality traits to ultimately be the most effective.  There are many ways to be successful in SEO and I often speak about the method that has worked well for me.  It has worked well for me because it is aligned with my personality.  If you are working on SEO in a manner that is not aligned with your personality, you likely will not see the same sort of success that I do implementing the same strategies.

In addition, I have left out a number of real examples where I succeeded and real examples where I have failed.  Simply to avoid giving out too much details about how I have discovered what works in the search engine optimization world.  One thing that is absolutely key is trial and error is the name of the game.  You can be smart about what you try and you can learn from other people’s errors.  Sometimes the plans work, and sometimes they don’t.  No matter what, there are things to learn from all cases.

The effect of not including my personal details within my blog posts is it is now used for one reason only, that is to gather the information as proposed in the title of the post.   This is fine for some instances.  It is, however, not exactly who I am and what I am all about.  As an individual, I love to inspire others.  The current blog offers very little “inspirational” material to cause significant actions or change.  In SEO and online business building, a little extra inspiration done in the right areas can significantly cause unexpected growth.

In addition, my previous posts (while I feel they have good and relevant content) lack that differentiation from any other blog website.  The difference from what I present as compared to other blog posts on business building, seo, and web development comes from life experiences I have encountered that led me to where I am.

I am learning every day that to be successful in the online world, you have to be willing to change.   You have to be willing to grow.  And many times, you have to listen and act on what you are inspired to do.

Who am I?

I am not a traditional SEO “expert” that you encounter all the time in your inbox (unwelcomed emails of course soliciting business to drive traffic to your website).  I am not an individual located in an outsourcing hub spamming comment throughout the Internet to create backlinks.  Nor am I an individual that tries to state that I have cracked the code to dominate Google and get yourself on top of the search engine rankings.

Instead, I am an individual that has been working day in and day out in the online business world for almost 15 years now.  I read and think about online business development constantly.  I have had many successes and failures in the online business world and have luckily been able to learn from each of them to improve for the next round.

I have now decided that I am going to open up the back door to my online business world.  Many of my new posts will now have specific lessons I have learned along the way to gaining success in business online.  Often, it is the hard learned lessons that can be the most inspirational to cause change.

In effect, my blog will now become a way for you to look at my notes that have in the past, and continue to change my personal and business lives daily for the better.  These are notes from ventures that may not have turned as successful as planned.   Also contained are notes from ventures that surprised me and became more successful than planned.  Finally, there are notes from learned discoveries through research and reading.

The Change, My Personal Challenge

The more and more I have tried to resist the urge to share in depth discussions from my life experiences (both business and personal) the more I realized I’m holding out on my most important asset that can assist others in their business building growth.  So here’s what to expect from the change:

1. Examples from Experiences that Lead to Growth and Change
2. Life Lessons Learned the Hard Way
3. Everyday stories that changed my perspective
4. Inspirational thoughts and understandings

I have turned these discoveries into a series of emails that I will deliver to your inbox sometimes from day to day, sometimes from week to week depending on the actionable being recommended.  In these emails, I have discussed many of my life lessons and business experiences that transformed my life.  From each lesson and experience, I have created an actionable activity.  In some instances, it may be a very specific action that focuses on a specific change to your website structure coding.  A change that may cause simple yet massive change to your search engine rankings.   In other cases, the action may be more on the life development side such as reminders to spend time with loved ones.

All of the actions have one thing in mind, to inspire you to become a better you, and inspire change to your business to reach higher success levels.

If you are interested in signing up for this free inspirational email course or if you simply want to follow me along this journey as my business begins to change, please enter your name and email below.

Backlinks are basically links pointing from different places to your website. It may sound an easy task; however, when you start doing it you would understand its complication. You need lots of efforts and time to build up quality backlinks. Backlinks are considered as an important element of SEO. If you are willing to make your site visible over search engines, backlinks can help you in doing so. For higher and better page rankings, you are supposed to create a number of backlinks. Quality backlinks has much role to play in search engine optimization, so when it comes to building up these links, there are certain set methods, which can help you in getting the same. Let’s explore some of the effective ways to generate quality backlinks for your site.

Blog comments

Commenting over a number of sites that belongs to your niche area is one of the best ways to get quality backlinks. However, when it comes to getting quality backlinks using this option of blog comments, it is certainly not an easy nut to crack. This is because not all the blogs or site will allow you to make comments over their blog posts or articles. The best way to get your comments approved over different blog posts is by contributing something valuable over the discussion. Always consider the blogs or sites, which happen to be relevant or fall under your niche area along with the ones that carry a number of commentators in it. So instead of putting some spam messages like nice post, thanks for sharing such valuable information, wonderful work, keep it up, etc. make sure you end up putting some quality comments then only you could expect to get quality backlinks.

Guest blog posts

Another effective way to build up quality backlinks is by guest posts. But for this you need to be good in your writing skills to produce high quality articles then only you would be approved for the guest post by authority blogs or sites over the web. Once you have the necessary skills, you can contact the blogger or webmaster and request for the guest blog post. But before that make sure to check the topics the blog covers unless the blogger or webmaster finds your article relevant to their blog or site, he or she will not allow you for this. It is important to follow their guidelines and ensure to the fact that both your blog and theirs happen to be relevant to each other. If you are able to write interesting and quality articles, no one would stop you to contribute for the guest blog posts wherein you get the chance to put your links that act like a backlink. The higher the quality of blogs or sites where you contribute the better would be the quality of your backlinks.

Article writing

As per the recent changes seen in Google’s algorithm most of the people may not find it a viable option, however, if you are able to create high quality content by submitting over the authority websites including Squidoo or Hubpages then it could work wonder for you. Also, you could also think of targeting your keywords in these articles as the content at these articles would stay for long thus benefitting you to have a long lasting kind of quality backlinks. This could be a rigorous work, as you need to find a number of authority sites and keep on submitting till you see getting the backlinks. Hence if you choose to go consistent in your efforts, you end up getting your desired quality backlinks.

Social bookmarking

The backlinks that comes from high page rank website is always a pleasing thing, however, if this comes for free the pleasure simple multiples a lot. With the help of social bookmarking, you can save all your favorite bookmarks over the web and read at the later stage. At the same time it gives you some free backlinks. Using the sites like Socialmonkee.com for your social bookmarking efforts could pay you rich dividends as it helps you in bookmarking for 25 different social bookmarking websites and that too for free.

Try link bait

Link baits are useful and high quality content, which are powerful enough to be shared by different people without any effort. If you are able to come out with high quality content, which people can simply enjoy reading, it should be easily shared by the people in a natural way. You will find them being shared over social media sites, wherein you get so many likes and tweets. This will help you in ranking a number of keywords used in the article. If you focus on link bait and come out with high quality article on a consistent basis you end up getting a number of quality backlinks.

Final word

For getting high quality backlinks, you need loads of efforts and time; however, if you rely over these ways as discussed above, you could end up getting your desired links. All you need to do is to keep on trying with consistency and patience. It’s not an overnight phenomenon.

About The Author: Margaret is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, travelling and reading books. She contributes to Social Cloud.

Have you recently browsed Yahoo’s website? Don’t be surprised of the new look. Yes, Yahoo has revamped its website’s homepage. This longed-for redesign of the primary entry into Yahoo’s website occurred several months after the company hired their new CEO. The new look of Yahoo’s homepage debuted in the United States. Days after its launch in the US, it was unveiled to everyone around the globe.

So, why did Yahoo have to redesign their website’s homepage? Was there really a need to redesign? How did web users welcome Yahoo’s homepage redesign?

Why Yahoo Redesigned Its Homepage?

In the last four years, Yahoo has experienced a significant financial weakness and revenue drop. From 2008 to 2012, Yahoo’s profit dropped by about 30% since more advertising activities surged to online rivals like social networking giant, Facebook, Inc., and search engine king, Google, Inc. Yahoo’s new CEO saw that the redesign will likely “inspire and delight” web users to use Yahoo’s services regularly. With this, it can definitely revitalize and recover the revenue growth of Yahoo, Inc.

Even though Yahoo’s failing revenue, its homepage is still one of the most visited pages in the web. However, web visitors of Yahoo.com spent not as much as they check in. Additionally, there haven’t been a significant number of return visits every month. The problem of capturing more web users’ online time is probably one of the reasons that pushed Yahoo to redesign.

What To Expect From The Redesigned Yahoo

Although the redesign of Yahoo’s homepage is not that radical, it has several alterations which can certainly draw the attention of a web user for a considerable amount of online time.

For years, Yahoo has already gathered a lot of information about the web users who have been visiting their website, specifically those who logged in while browsing. In addition, those people who connected Yahoo to their social media accounts have also helped the company to know which stories and subjects appeal to more web users. On top of that, Yahoo has also developed more refined means to determine which topics will interest and drive different web users to its homepage so that the stories featured will cater to the various tastes of visitors.

More and additional tools are also provided by the company so that web users can personally fine-tune and choose their areas of interest. Its news feeds has also its share of revamp as it will now continuously be refreshed with more material as a web user will scroll down. The infinite scroll of stories can be tailored to the web user’s preferences and filled with friends’ recommendations on social networking sites.

With the popularity of web browsing through smartphones and tablets, one can easily peruse a number of stories. The new homepage displays text snippets of stories which is very helpful when browsing on mobiles devices with smaller screens.

The left side of the new homepage is devoted to the various services of Yahoo while the right side designed for Yahoo “utilities.” Utilities include finance, weather, video clips, sports, and more. Each utility can be set to what a user want like the weather in a particular area, stocks in a personal investment portfolio, etc. A utility can be cancelled if the web user wishes.

“Netizens” Take On Yahoo’s New Look

There have been mixed reviews and reactions on Yahoo’s redesigned homepage. Of course, there are those that welcomed and embraced the company’s move positively. However, there are a number of “netizens” or web users who found it as an epic fail.

Many have found the new homepage as personal and intuitive mainly because of its customizable news feed which allows any web user to browse the latest headlines and articles based on their preferences. Although this change is not that dramatic, it is still new and different which gives a fresh twist on the “Yahoo experience.” Apart from its optimization for tablets and smartphones, a number of web users appreciate Yahoo’s new look as it incorporates social streams. With this, it is branded as the more social-centric homepage.

Of course, instead of improving its homepage, there are others who think that Yahoo actually failed to do so. Several people disclosed that it is now their least favorite online destination. Many found the “infinite scroll” to be horrible and not user-friendly among other things. Others find the homepage quite annoying and too difficult to navigate. After having browsed Yahoo’s new homepage, many dismayed web users are asking the company the question, “Why fix something that wasn’t broke?”

Well, if you ask me, change is good. However, change for the sake of changing isn’t always best. Now, the company said that the redesigned homepage was just the first of many. Yahoo is not done yet. Let’s wait and see what they will roll out in the coming months.

How about you? Do you love Yahoo’s new homepage?

Do you need photos to be used in your small business website? Are you planning to place the perfect pictures for your posts in your blog site? Well, there is more than one way of finding the ideal images or photos which will work for your needs and to your advantage. You can take the pictures by yourself, find several free photos online which are in the public domain, or hire an expert photographer to take them.

However, if you are one of those who are working within the limits of a pretty tight budget, frantically working in a hectic schedule to beat deadlines or don’t have the necessary skills to take perfect photos, the ways mentioned can be a challenge and won’t solve your problem. It might be best to turn to stock photos.

Getting and posting good quality pictures on your website is a big plus. Nowadays, there are many websites who are utilizing the advantages of stock photography. Website owners and administrators turn to stock photo websites to find high quality photos for their websites or blog sites.

There are many reasons which drive website owner and administrators to use stock photography for their websites and blog. However, before elaborating more on that, let’s get to know the concept of stock photography.

What’s Stock Photography?

For those who are unsure and unfamiliar of this concept, stock photography refers to licensed pictures for commercial or public use. These specific types of photos can be found on professional stock photography websites. Many web owners, web designers, advertising companies, graphic designers, and other professionals usually make use of stock photography to fill their design needs or for any creative assignments for that matter. Apart from being used as part of a website design, stock photos are also used for the purposes of marketing and advertising.

Nowadays, stock photos can be found in searchable online databases called stock photo websites (such as DepositPhotos, Shutterstock, iStockPhoto, Flickr, EveryStockPhoto, and many more). Stock photos can be bought and delivered online.

Frequently, these photos involve people. Stock photos are made in photography studios with the use of several of models posing like professionals, typecasts, expressing usual emotions and gestures. Other stock photos also involve pets or animals. The common niches of stock photography include images for conceptual photography, tourism and travel, healthcare, and of course, business.

When you make use of stock photos, you must be aware of the types of licenses. Types of stock photo licenses are Rights-Managed and Royalty-Free.

• Rights-Managed Stock Photography. The value of the license (final cost of the image) is determined based on factors such as the usage, particular use, duration, print run, size, territory, exclusivity, and industry. The license’s terms are evidently defined and conferred so that you (as the buyer) will receive maximum value and be protected by a specific level of exclusiveness.
  If you make use of Rights-Manages stock photos, you will be guaranteed that the photo you buy will not be used buy others in a contradictory manner.
• Royalty-Free Stock Photography. Don’t be mislead with the “free.” It is not free to use without buying a license or that the photo is in a public domain. It really means you’re free from the royalties or paying every time you use a photo.

When To Use Stock Photography

The need for images in websites has increased dramatically over the years. At these times, you might have seen many websites that make use of stock photos. With this, many website owners, online marketing professionals, graphic designers, etc. are using stock photo agencies to purchase their photos or images.

Of course, you need to remember that stock photos can make or break your website your blog site. So, you should use stock photography in your website/blog site to:

• Add Visual Appeal. If you want to make your website appealing, you should buy stock photos. Stock photography can add color and beauty to your website. Your readers (and or customers) will be enticed and encouraged to read your posts and explore your website more. The images can even spark the interests of your readers, customers, or even potential clients when they come across your website online. An interesting and appealing website is attractive to the eyes of the web users.
• Make Your Website Dynamic. If you don’t want your website to be plain and dry, it is best to use stock photography. High quality stock photos will definitely make your website dynamic and lively. An overall lively and energetic look for your website can invite more visitors and readers, eventually help you obtain more customers (for small business websites).
• Provide Visual Presentation to Content. Now, for some people, reading content which is purely text is quite boring. You don’t want your readers to bask in boredom when reading your posts. Your readers, potential website users and customers will likely not immediately read your text. Most of them will check your website, browse and scroll your pages. Stock photos with your content can stir up their interests and curiosity. The photos will help them, at least, get an idea of what your content or post is all about.
• Prove Your Point. For sure, you have experienced not being able to get your opinion or idea across to your readers successfully. Some of your readers can get confused and not fully understand what you are trying to point out in your content or posts. If you make use of stock photos to complement your text content or posts, your readers can easily get what you are trying to say just by looking at your photos. With one look at your images, your readers can grasp your ideas.
• Create Instant Conversation. Well, photos can kindle the curiosities of your readers. We already establish that great stock photos draw readers to read your articles, posts, or web content. Your photos can become instant conversation starter in many cases.
• Stir Up Emotions. Many people buy products and avail of services for emotional reasons. You should make use of stock photos on your website which will help your customers feel the emotion of your products and services can possible give them. Eventually. They will take action. A picture of a person smiling or smirking with your product or service can bring out positive emotions. A picture of relaxation can give a different feeling to your customers and make them relate relaxation to your products or services. If you make your customers feel happy, relaxed, or excited, you can be able to connect with them better. This can lead you to make more leads and close more sales.
• Portray What Your Business Does. If your business directly deals with clients, you can benefit more if you include stock photos of people in your website. the photos don’t need to be the real people who are working in your business. However, the photos should portray an action which your business involves in.

If your business partakes in sales, find stock photos with people smiling to convey that your staff are happy and ready to help clients. If your business is in the industrial and trade industry, make sure that the stock photos you place in your website depict the actual work that your business does.

Of course, if you need photos to represent your small business in your website, it is still best to produce your own unique and original images by yourself. The photos should be specific to you and what you do. However, getting stock photos is the next best thing to utilize, especially if you don’t have the time to create the images by yourself. You must remember to take notice on the quality of the stock photos you choose to buy.