Search Engine Optimization Tips, SEO for Blogs, Search Tips

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Links are a validation of the quality, relevancy and content of your site. Here’s how can you find quality link partners without spending hours on the net.

How to find Quality and Relevant link partners for your site or blog?
The smartest way is to go to human edited directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory
, and Business.com. Only dmoz.org does not accept payments for including sites and blog, the other two do. Although not every site or blog that pays a fee gets listed.

Why should you find link partners on sources like Dmoz.org?
They are edited by humans who abide by certain quality guidelines and choose only those that are worthy to be recommended as a resource. The editors also sort them according to relevancy.

Browse any of these directories and look for relevant sites and blogs to seek partnership with. Identify related sites too as that is also a good link partnership. If you are a recruiting firm, then you should also look at related resources for linking – hr software, job sites, job search engines, hr trainers, hr blogs, hr directories, resume writers etc. Since they are relevant to your audience.

Hit each of their sites and find out the quality of stuff or service the site offers. If you are satisfied that it’s good to link with, them get a mail id or use the contact form to send them a mail seeking link exchange. Tell them why you think it’d be beneficial for them. The link exchange mail should be no more than 6 to 8 lines.

Will blogs link faster than sites?
Yes, bloggers as a group believe in linking to good stuff. Search good blog directories, aggregators and blog catalogs. Technorati, Blogcatalog could be a good starting point.

Where else to find link partners?
Google to find link partners. This could be a very time consuming activity as you have to verify every site that comes up on the results page and them reach out for links.

How can I find other linking resources?
Each of the quality sites that you identify will have a links or related resources page. That should be a good starting point to continue searching for more linking partners.

Where should I start to build links?
Put up a Related Resources link on your site. And select the best of the sites in your domain and publish them, under different categories. This will give users a goo place to look at other resources. When this page gets a page rank, you’ll find it easier to fetch links from other sites.

What do I recommend?
If you want to build a quality site with authoritative resources, then be very careful while choosing link partners. Research and find out good resources before you recommend them to your visitors. Do not choose any site even if it is recommended by an expert. Read through the site and satisfy yourself that your users will find it useful and only then should you link to it.

When should you look for sites to link with?
Build a good site with nice quality content. Do atleast 50 quality postings before attempting to find link partners.

Teething troubles
When you have no page rank and little traffic, you’d find it difficult to get someone to link to you. But, let me assure you that good quality sites will attract links, come what may.

But don’t worry, keep publishing good quality links and you’ll be able to attract good links.

Hey, if you found this article interesting, start your “link karma” by linking to this post or blog.

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Google new Website Optimizer, is a great tool that helps in improving your conversion rates.

Work on your landing pages. Improve your headlines, make them attractive enough to click. Call to action on your page, click here, download etc.

Try different designs by moving your sections here and there. Run the test for two weeks. Find out which page is performing well. Take action by moving the page into the best performing design or layout.

Tips to Improve Reduce Bounce Rates
Most visitors land on your home page. Therefore the content for the “keywords” that drive maxim visitors must be shown right at the top. The reason being if visitors don’t see the content they searched for, they’ll quit the page.

Showcase Related Content
The next thing you must do is show highly related content very prominently on the page.
Example: If you have high bounce on a “how to improve trust in relationships”, then the related content like Communicating Openly, Art of Listening, 10 Ways to Connect to People you Love must be prominently showcased. Related videos, downloads, audio files, shopping items can also be shown at the end of article.

Where do your visitors come from
Find out from where these visitors are coming. That should give you a fair idea of bounce rates.
Good content means low bounce. Write good content. Give what users want. Give more of it and they’ll stick to site.

Build a sticky site
Use sticky elements like free giveaways, feeds, free newsletters, features like polls, comments, downloads, contests to keep and grow your visitors.

Analytics is a great tool to understand your users, analyze traffic behavior and improve your traffic and page rank. Let’s look inside Google Analytics and learn about your content.

The analytics dashboard shows you the traffic for each day. It gives you the number of visitors, time spent per user, no of pages seen per user.

But there’s much more the numbers reveal!
For example, check your “Top Content” in Content Overview. This reveals the top hit pages and gives you the “keywords” used by the users to land on this page. This is an important thing to note.

Tip: You must capitalize on the keywords information of the “most read” pages, by creating more pages on the same subject. And optimizing them with the sprinkling of keywords used by your visitors. This gives visitors more quality content on the same subject leading to more pages being browsed by visitors.

Apart from this, Google Analytics also reveals a ton of information about how users landed on this page, which page did they read next. This gives information about what users are looking for. And helps you create content that keeps on site for long. This also shows what users look for next when they navigate your pages. Study them and implement navigation accordingly where visitors can go through related content with ease.

The source of each of your top content is also revealed in Google Analytics. This helps you tailor make your content, keeping in mind the needs of those countries’ users. And later orient your marketing strategies accordingly.

Find out the previous pages they visited and showcase a list of “next pages visited”, since that’s related content for users as their behavior shows on your site or blog.

The “Top exit pages” need to be carefully analyzed. Where did visitors come from, where did they navigate to and which page did they exit from. Find reasons why they went away – did they get what they wanted or they didn’t find what they were looking for. Were related articles not showcased on these pages. Then work on your findings. Build more content to keep visitors on site.

The “site overlay” shows the percentage of clicks on each of the links shown on the site home page. This helps you understand how a visitors sees and behaves on your home page.

Analyzing your content and implementing more quality content and showing related content helps visitors to find content they want and keeps them on site longer.

Google has improved its ability to crawl and index flash files. And also read the urls in the flash banners on your site. Five cheers to Google’s indexing team.

Google Flash Indexing Interview

Google Flash Indexing Announcement

All text files in any type of SWF whether banners, buttons or ad slots. They can read and crawl all the text and index them. This largely helps sites which may have have important content on those SWF files. Goolge’s algo can’t yet read the images, but I guess that’s not way off. This June 2008 update is a boon to webmasters who for long wondered what to do for getting flash content indexed.

However if your flash file is getting uploaded via a javascript, Google may find it difficult. If the flash file is

Adobe Flash Technology work in making things searchable helped Google in indexing flash content. Web designers would be a delighted lot and can continue their creative work.

Matt Cutts, a Ph.D in Computer graphics, is the Head of Google’s Webspam Team. He was instrumental in launching SafeSearch, Google’s family filter that helps keep the web safe for children.

This Search engine optimization evangelist is Google’s spokesperson for Search quality related issues. A regular at all major Search Engine conferences, Matt Cutts tirelessly travels to meet webmasters across the world, understanding issues and reporting them back to the Google Team to help find solutions.

A subject matter expert on Search Engine Optimization, he often offers his advice and clarifies major SEO and search isssues on his personal blog. Matt Cutts Blog on SEO

Often he also pops up at Google Webmaster Blog

You may also be interested in reading his interviews. Google Webmaster Blog