Wouldn’t it be great if people who came to your site WANTED to show off a link back to your site?  There are plenty of company’s out there enticing people to do just that.  Let’s take a look at a few:

Kiva – People rave about Kiva and are proud to place a big, colorful, ad about Kiva on their websites.  Why?  Because they feel great about donating to Kiva and want to publicize their generosity. 

Bruce Clay – Bruce Clay has hundreds of backlinks from relevant, related, SEO sites.  Why?  Because Bruce Clay set the standards for SEO and then allowed people to boast their Bruce Clay seal of approval on their websites.

eZine Articles – There are hundreds of content writers promoting the link to eZine Articles on their websites.  Why?  Because eZine articles offers authors a collection of “expert author” labels that increase an author’s credibility.

In each case, the company’s have created a demand for their logo by devising a program that increases the website owner’s credibility.  In order for someone to WANT to add your link to their page, they’ve got to WANT to show off their affiliation.  When an affiliate with you boosts another person or business’ credibility, they are happy to promote your link!

Also, each of these sites makes it easy for others to add the link. They provide a selection of images and the ready-made HTML code so that it can be easily placed right on the website.   

How can you incorporate these ideas on your site and start building your backlinks?

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Many people have never heard of Google Base – and if they have, aren’t really sure what it does.  This tool, found by logging into your Google profile and clicking on “Base”, allows you to upload all of your content directly into a Google information database. 

Google Base gives you full control over your content with its WYSIWYG editor.  Unlike many other places where you can distribute content, Google Base allows for unlimited use of anchor text, images, formatting, and even offers stats. 

Still, the impact of Google Base is elusive… I’m experimenting with it by posting some articles and press releases on it – mostly for the anchor text, but also to see if Base drives any traffic.  There have been a few hits on the content, but nothing to get excited about. 

I think where Base will really shine is for home shopping or car shopping or types of shopping where products have lots of attributes.  For example, you could use Google to find all 4 bedroom houses with a pool and a 3 car garage in San Diego – rather than going just to one site’s MLS listing.  Same with cars – search for all 2004 blue BMW 325i’s within 100 miles of your house instead of going to one site and viewing their listings. 

This is a hunch – anyone else have any personal experiences or theories about the direction of Base?  Leave a comment and share!

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There are lots of SEO Tools out there to help you gain perspective of your website from a search engine’s point of view. Perhaps the most fun and intriguing are those that allow you to learn more about your competitor’s SEO strategy.

Get ready to spend a few hours going down this rabbit hole… here are 5 of our top picks for tools that reveal SEO insight on your competitors:

Spy Fu:

Find out who’s paying what for online advertising among your competitors. Spy Fu is the follow up to Googspy.com and offers tons of features. Because SpyFu is currently in Beta, some of the data may be a few months behind, but incredibly insightful nonetheless.

Cost: Free

Niche Watch

Before you go spying on your competition, you have to know who they are. Niche Watch gives you a quick overview of the top 20 sites you must compete with to take the top spots. You’ll also get an overview for each competitor about of the number of backlinks to the page, backlinks to the domain, on-page keyword count, number of pages indexed in Google, and more.

Cost: Free

SEO SpyGlass

Shows you at a glance all the techniques your competitors are using to gain a foothold in the search engine rakings. By analyzing their tactics, you can formulate an optimization strategy that’s a step ahead.

Cost: $87 for a professional license

NeboWeb Search Engine ScoreCard

This nifty little tool allows you to size yourself up next to your competitors. Compare page rank, inbound links, on-page optimization factors, and ranking position for keywords in Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AOL. This tool doesn’t offer too much information you can take action on, but shows how you stack up to the competition.

Cost: Free

The Way Back Machine

There is something very rewarding about looking back on your competitors websites over the years. You’ll see how their websites have changed and gain insight about how their strategy has changed over the years as well.

Cost: Free

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It’s commonly thought that a dozen of pages is better than fewer pages. Google forces to redefine this belief. Google has been constantly improving on their duplicate content filters and began using PageRank limitations.

Such implementations on Google’s part forced webmasters into a dilema of avoiding those filters. The solutions was found. The renowned Shoemoney increased his Google search traffic 1400% by not allowing spiders index some of his pages.

At times the search engine’s preferences do not fit into the humans preferences. Online shoppers like to sort through products by price or look at different sizes and colors. Such pages create near duplicate content which major SE’s do not like. What do you do then?
What Shoemoney and other SEO’s do is they make duplicate pages non indexable using robots.txt file. This is how you protect your page rank and avoid penalties for duplicate content, and, of course, increase traffic.

If you’re not careful about link equity getting low value pages indexed then your valuable pages will not rank as well as they could because too many empty, duplicate content pages were indexed.

When planning the information architecture of your website, you have to keep low value pages off the pages that drive you traffic. Check Google for more information on how to use the robots.txt.

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