SEOly Blog

.edu and .gov links are highly desired in the seo world because they generally have a small amount of links on their sites, and they themselves are respected by search engines as containing relevant quality content.  Some methods that you can employ to get .edu and .gov links include:

• Become a sponsor or advertiser – Try to find government or university sites that are accepting sponsors.  You will have to spend money, but you will be obtaining links and possibly ads.   If they do not post ads, see if they offer links to sponsors that donate to them.  Your donation may be considered tax deductible depends on the laws in your area and whether or not the university classifies as a charity.
• Answer questions – If the site has a forum you can post and answer questions there.  This does not mean spam your links, but if allowed provide a link to your site.
• Hold an event – Contact the university with the details or your event or contest, if you plan to hold an event for the university students or employs.  If accepted, their website will post your event and link back to your site with more details.

Always be sure to read the rules of the university of government site and ensure that the method that you plan to use complies with these rules.  Be aware that obtaining links from .edu sites is generally much easier than obtaining links from .gov sites.  Additionally, it can be even easier to obtain links from the student sectors of the .edu sites.  Ensure that the content of the site that you want the .gov or .edu site to link to is quality and relevant content as this will make it much smoother.

Posted in Links, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Tags: .edu, .gov, Links, search engine optimization, seo

The anchor text is the text that is shown to the user, so in <a href=”http://seoly.com/blog”>Webmaster Blog</a>, “Webmaster Blog” is the anchor text.  This anchor text is extremely important because it tells the readers or search engines what type of information this link contains.  When you are linking to another site, ensure to use proper relevant anchor text; additionally, when other sites are linking to you, ensure that this site rightly represents your website.  Below is an example of proper and improper usage of anchor text:

• Proper: Find out great tips about the benefits of organic seo.
• Improper: Find out great tips about the benefits of organic seo here.

The first link clearly has more relevant anchor text because it states directly what the link is about; the anchor text should be able to stand alone and give the user a complete idea about what this link will have information regarding prior to opening this link.  Furthermore, you can interlink many of your webpages by simply adding links, where relevant, to other webpages on your site that discuss that topic.  For instance, if you mention the terms “smart priced”, then you can use these terms as anchor text to the related webpage: “What are the chances of being smart priced by Google?”  Anchor text has significant importance when it comes to seo, so use it in the correct manner to optimize your website.

Posted in Links, Search Engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Tags: anchor text, linking, Links

You should use dashes, -, instead of underscores, _, generally when it comes to urls in seo.  If you have term1-term2 in a url, then the search engine will see these terms as the following: term1, term2, term1 term2, or term2 term1.  This is must more friendly to search engines.  The exception to using dashes is if you have a term like _MAXINT, which may be different from MAXINT in programming languages.  In reality though, Google has made adjustments for dashes and underscores, so that you can use them interchangeably with some respect.  It is possible for Google to make a mistake in parsing your url terms if you use underscores, thus it is safer to use dashes to avoid any problems.  These are the differences in how search engines view dashes and underscores, and the reasons that dashes are better to use in normal circumstances.

Posted in Search Engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Tags: -, dashes, search engine optimization, seo, underscore, _

Organic seo, also known as natural seo, is the attempt to build up your search engine rankings or serps for your keywords without paying for placement.  Organic seo enables you to get visitors from search engines without having to pay for them.  To be successful and benefit when it comes to organic seo, you must create and maintain a website that provides relevant information when it comes to your keywords.  Organic seo can take a lot of effort to improve your serps, and the progress will likely be seen over the period of months.  Some ways to improve your organic seo is to:

• Create a lot of relevant content
• Gain quality inbound links (due to this relevant content)
• Optimize markup

The benefits of organic seo is that it will provide stable, free, and relatively long term traffic for your website; however, the effort that is involved in optimizing organic seo is much more substantial than simply starting up a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign.

Posted in Search Engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Tags: organic seo, search engine optimization, seo

Buying links can clearly get you a large amount of links in a short period of time as opposed to organically building these links as your website grows and develops.  “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”  Although it may be tempting to buy links to gain an edge in seo, it will likely have greater negative effects than positive ones.  Google has recently started to crack down on websites that buy and sell links.  Websites can experience serious drops in pagerank and their serps due to improper link exchange.  Of course Google will not punish for paid links if they do not find out, but Google is improving their methods for improper link exchange, and it is quite likely that your site will be punish if it engages in these activities.  Instead of wasting time with paid links which will result in Google penalties, you may just want to effectively buy links by buying a website.  Link exchange should be done in an organic manner as this will improve your seo naturally, and you will not have to worry about your website being punished for selling or buying links.

Posted in Google, Links, Promotion, Search Engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Tags: Links, search engine optimization, seo