The classic tongue-in-cheek movie Princess Bride has a scene that could easily apply to the life and death of link building for SEO.

Miracle Max: He probably owes you money huh? I’ll ask him.

Inigo Montoya: He’s dead. He can’t talk.

Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.

Inigo Montoya: What’s that?

Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

If you believe Google and Bing, link building for the sake of SEO is dead. Their search engine experts keep saying in public that sites should focus on building great content and forget about building backlinks. (more…)

Article marketing for SEO is a tactic that helps improve search engine results for a Web site’s most important keywords if it’s done carefully and done on high-quality sites.

In simple terms, it’s the practice of writing an article about your site and putting it on another site.

The other site typically specializes in articles written specifically for promotional purposes. Five of the largest are:

1. HubPages.com
2. EzineArticles.com
3. Squidoo.com
4. Voices.Yahoo.com
5. GoArticles.com

Anyone interested in building site audience and search engine rankings to build their online business will go to one of these sites, sign up for an account and start writing.

Some of these sites require a minimum of 500 words per article, and some require much more. (more…)

Increasing your Web site’s traffic requires juggling multiple ways of getting audience to get the best results.

It also requires putting a consistent amount of effort into each of these sources and then prioritizing the time and effort based on which ones produce the most audience.

The tactics below all work well but in different ways for different sites. At least several months of consistent work should go into each one before deciding which tactic deserves the most attention. (more…)

Many Web sites have been damaged and in some cases have been sold or folded because of the way Google has changed its approach to ranking sites in its search results. TFQ79RCN7GY9

The impact has altered the way sites approach search engine optimization tactics.

This article is not an analysis of the Google search algorithm and how a site can manipulate results in the world of Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird and other Google search initiatives.

Instead, it focuses on one consequence in particular and what to do about it, starting with content quality.

Nofollow Rockets Up

n 2005, Google’s Matt Cutts and other experts proposed the nofollow link as a way of reducing spam on blogs. (more…)

Getting SEO results can be frustrating because the time and effort spent on a campaign may not lead to better rankings for the best pages on a site.

Instead, they may lead to better rankings for a lousy page on the site.

The definition of lousy is a page that has low value and isn’t part of the campaign to improve results.

It also might not be part of the core identity of the site. It might be a subject that could be considered rather lightweight compared to other pages.

What’s surprising is that a lone, unwanted, low-value page might suddenly pop to No. 1 in search rankings.

Why would that happen? It could — and does — happen for several important reasons. (more…)

Search engines are great when they bring free audience to a site through organic search results. But some search spiders are simply terrible.

They are terrible because they come from a product that doesn’t provide any audience.

They are especially terrible when they pour through a site, consume vast amounts of bandwidth and come back again for more, ever hungry.

SEO might stand for not just Search Engine Optimization but also Search Engine Opposition.

Obviously every site wants to attract the most audience possible from Google, Bing and other good search engines.

But sometimes blocking search engines is a good thing. (more…)