Posts Tagged ‘webinar’

How to get inbound links

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

This is a follow-up to my previous blog entry, “I link, therefore I am… on top of Google.” I’m talking about what I learned at Webmarketing123’s August 5, 2009 Webinar, “Advanced SEO Webinar: Linking Best Practices.” Without further ado, I’ll return to where I left off.

Fingers touching light

Unless a website is cached or saved by search engines on a regular basis, the links found on it won’t count toward the search engine optimization of the sites it links to. That explains why Google can’t keep up with Twitter and other social-media sites, as I discussed in an earlier eHarbor Blog entry. It’s trying to take a snapshot of websites that change multiple times every second.

Returning to caches, I learned a cool trick at the Webinar that I would like to share. If you want to know if a Web page is cached by Google, all you have to do is type “cache:www.thesitename.com” into a Google search and it will tell you.

The big question is how do you get inbound links? After you’ve gone through and added great content that is relevant to your keywords, you can start using the following sources to get inbound links:

- Directories

- Paid Listings

- Article Syndications

- Blogs

- News Releases

We’re starting a new blog on the newly redesigned Submit Solution website, which will debut soon. We’ll be transferring our ecommerce and Internet marketing articles from the eHarbor Blog to that one soon. You can find the rest of this blog entry there after it debuts.

The photo of the fingers touching light is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of littledan77.

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Posted in SEO, Search Engines | No Comments »

I link, therefore I am… on top of Google

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

I enjoy Webmarketing123’s free Webinars on Internet marketing. I always learn a lot from them, and I try to apply what I learn. Today, I’ll talk about what I learned at their August 5, 2009 Webinar, “Advanced SEO Webinar: Linking Best Practices.”

Confusing keyboard arrows

The five things a website needs to get ranked on the first page of Google results are:

1. Keywords – The search terms you want people to type into a search engine in order to find your Web page.

2. Site Content – You need to use your chosen keywords in your website’s text to show search engines your site is relevant to those topics.

3. Meta Content – You don’t usually see this content, but it must be there in the backend of your site and in your Web page titles.

4. URLs – Include important keywords in your URLs. For example, it is better to have a URL like www.eharborinc.com/blog/2009/07/17/is-twitter-overhyped, which includes the date and headline keywords, than something like www.eharborinc.com/blog/post-81. The second URL gives no clue as to what it contains, while the first one gives a much better idea of the page’s subject matter.

5. Inbound Links – These are links (or votes) from other websites to your site. Search engines look at both the number and quality of the links you receive from other sites.

We’re starting a new blog on the newly redesigned Submit Solution website, which will debut soon. We’ll be shifting attention from the eHarbor Blog to that one soon. You can find the rest of this blog entry there. Stay tuned!

The photo of the confusing keyboard arrows is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of jeremyfoo.

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Posted in SEO, Web Design | 4 Comments »

Experts are wrong: Twitter and Facebook help SEO

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

By Robert Lockard

On Wednesday, July 15, 2009, I attended one of WebMarketing123.com’s free webinars, called “Increase Sales Through Social Media Optimization.” I highly recommend you attend these wonderful webinars. They teach a lot about search engine optimization, paid-search campaigns and other important ecommerce topics that can help your bottom line.

Free-Google-search coupon

At this particular webinar, the speakers talked a lot about optimizing websites to get the best results on search engines. That’s a topic I also covered in my seven-part SEO series a while back. The part that really caught my interest was when they talked about social media and its relation to SEO.

The speakers said Facebook and Twitter are not useful at all for gaining first-page ranking on search engines, like Google or Bing. Any links posted on these two websites have a “nofollow” tag in their HTML code, telling search engines to disregard them in their algorithms. The good news is links on other social networks, such as Digg, LinkedIn, Technorati and Propeller, actually do count toward SEO for your website.

I also took away from the webinar the fact that Facebook and Twitter are great for generating qualified leads. You can tweet about company offers or post links to landing pages on your Facebook wall to invite interested customers to your site. They can definitely help increase traffic to your website, though not through the search engines.

I think the webinar speakers got one thing wrong, though. They said Facebook and Twitter offer absolutely no help with SEO, but I think that’s only partly true. Yes, they don’t offer direct SEO because the links on them don’t attract search engines’ attention. But one of the reasons you post a link on these sites is to get other social-media users to find it and post a link to it on their own blog or website. And that does help with SEO because inbound links are powerful.

I think Twitter and Facebook are useful SEO tools, even though they might not seem so at first glance. I’ve been talking a lot about Twitter and Facebook in the last week. My last eHarbor blog entry was called “Is Twitter overhyped?” but now I’m starting to realize Twitter is more helpful than I previously thought. Both Twitter and Facebook are fascinating tools and they can be useful when incorporated into an overall marketing strategy that includes SEO and other online strategies.

The photo of the free Google search coupon is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Bramus.

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Posted in SEO, Social Media | 2 Comments »