SEO Tips

How to Linkbait

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:19:46 GMT

Nick Wilson on his new blog for bloggers summarizes 5 key "hooks" bloggers (and probably anybody else in fact) can use to successfully attract links:

News hook

Contrary Hook

Attack Hook

Resource Hook

Humour Hook

In under a year, Nick brought threadwatch.org from nothing to being one of most highly regarded marketing / tech blogs out there, so we can assume he knows what he's talking about.

More Powerful Robots.txt Exclusion For Google

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 21:15:49 GMT

SEO Book points to Dan Thies's finding of a useful but non-standard robots.txt feature supported by the Google spider:

[...] Google has introduced increased flexibility to the robots.txt file standard through the use asterisks. Disallow patterns may include "*" to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in "$" to indicate the end of a name. To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, to include .jpg but not .gif images), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /*.gif$

Although Google's explanation only mentions the wildcard syntax in context to their image bot, standard Googlebot also seems to understand it as well. For example:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.php$

Would block all files ending with the php extension.

Good Time To Buy Neglected Domains

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 04:24:35 GMT

SEO Book gives some good reasons why now is a good time to buy in some old and neglected domains in your vertical.

Older domains can provide a good source of link popularity for you to point around, Google's algorithm also favors matured domains.

Since Google are believed to use WHOIS data, you may want to consider negotiating with the owner to keep their WHOIS details present. In doing this you can prevent any dampening filters that might otherwise be triggered when a domain is switches owner. Please be aware though, that ICANN can confiscate your domain for invalid/out-of-date WHOIS data.

The Importance of Contextual Linkage

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 13:42:20 GMT

Jim Boykin emphasises the increasing irrelevance of low quality, high quantity links, and the increasing need for "Links within Content and Linking to Content" to perform effective SEO:

Yesterdays link monkey is worthless today. The teamwork of tomorrow includes having the site owner make a real resource. They need to give away information, give away free tools, link out great, add a forum, blog, Content, Content, Content (and all unique…and no machine generated crap),

This content should link out to trusted content within the text, and should be written about things that are good enough to get links. Newsworthy or reference worthy material. You should do everything you can to provide something of value that people would want to link to - yea, the things that Jill Whalen has been preaching since 1995. And Look where she’s now.

Although his theory is somewhat speculative; some applied common sense on how search engine algorithms ideally could be engineered for relevancy, combined with some anecdotal evidence, such as how link networks seem to have been dampened since the Jagger updates; suggest he's spot on.

Found via SEO Book

SEO Tip of the Day: Press Releases Offer Low Cost Inbound Links

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:05:00 GMT

Distributing press releases is a relatively cheap and efficient way to acquire inbound links. PRWeb which for $80 will publicize your press release is considered among many to offer the most exposure for your dollar.