Social Media is part of linkbuilding?

Social Media Presence is a huge part of SEO and link building. Facebook likes and Twitter Retweets affect your rankings. This has been discussed over and over again and confirmed by google.

Social is the new SEO. Links from these sites are safe, powerful, and effective, plus traffic potential which again contributes to your SEO endeavors...

Ohh and if you guys really think that google doesn't keep track and count ALL links including "nofollow" you're crazy. Want proof? Do a Comment/Wiki?Bookmark blast to a site you have in Webmaster Tools. Ping them, wait a few days. Most of those are nofollow... now check webmaster tools. What's this? Links showing up with nofollow tag. Go to the site, yep nofollow on all outbound links, how can this be?

Because all links are Followed! nofollow will not get you page rank, but its still a link from an external domain. How much authority do you think a link from Wikipedia gets your site... maybe it wont boost your PR, it might not even directly help you in the SERPS, but as part of an overall SEO Campaign, I definitely want it. How about contextual nofollow links surrounded by tons of keyword rich niche related content. Think those don't work?

How to start SEO for New Website

First of all, create a master plan for your web site. Check which category it belongs to and prepare a report of competitors in your category. Also check which are the areas your competitors focusing. Once, you get some ideas regarding niche make web site in a perfect way that is useful for user as well. Suppose your web site is related to travel, try to include reviews of customers who already visited your Hotel/resort or Houseboat. This attracts more customers to your web site.Then create keyword plan, content plan, blog, Link building. All takes times and you need to handle this with patience.

Here are some more tips to start seo for a new website.

1.) Identify your target market

Your target market is represented by the keyword phrase that best describes your niche. Decide if the volume of traffic is realistic for your business.

I usually target keywords with monthly Search volume of 1,000 - 100,000, but if I am working on a local client such as an Attorney, they may only be targeting keywords with a search volume of <100 per month. That's not a lot but if you consider that an attorney only needs 1 paid client, to cover their costs, it makes sense. 

2.) Choose a domain name with an exact keyword phrase match

One of the most effective methods i have found to rank on Google Top 5 is to register a domain name that is an exact keyword match. 

3.) Activate sub domains

In your CPanel account, you can add Sub Domains. So if a keyword phrase is not available for your main domain, then simply activate a sub domain. Sub domains are recognized by Google as a brand new website. You can have multiple sub domains linked from your main domain that drill down into deeper keyword micro niches.

Five Steps to Using Search Engine Optimization to Improve Your Page Ranks

Trying to get visitors to come to your Web site can be a big challenge. Search engine optimization attempts to take some of the guesswork out of this challenge by getting your Web pages to place highly in search engines. When you use search engine optimization, you aren't employing tricks or hacks, but instead writing your pages so that they provide exactly what your customers want while simultaneously showing it to the search engines effectively. These five tips will help you learn search engine optimization to get better rankings for your Web pages.

Step One: Pick a Target Phrase

When using search engine optimization, you need to determine one phrase that describes what your page is about. This is called your target phrase. A target phrase for your Web page should be three things:
Important
Your phrase should be an important part of the page information. If your page is about cat food, then your target phrase should include "cat food" and not just the word "cat".

Accurate

One of the commonly tried hacks with search engine optimization is to try to optimize on a phrase that isn't accurate for the content of the page. Just because the terms "sex" and "xxx" are popular doesn't mean you should optimize for them on your cat food page.
Popular

If your page is about cat food, your target phrase should be one that people will search on. People don't search for "cat chow" nearly as much as they search for "cat food", so "cat food" is a better choice.
Step Two: Analyze Your Competition

The second step in search engine optimization is to determine who your competition is. Remember that when you're doing search engine optimization, you're working at the page level, not the entire site. So while you might consider any site on pets to be your competition, for your target phrase "cat food" your competition is more specialized perhaps Purina.com or another cat food company rather than cats.about.com.

Check Yahoo and Google to see what shows up when you search for your target phrase.Examine the pages on the first page, note where and how they use your target phrase. You can use the "Cached" page option in Google to see your targeted phrase highlighted.Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase there is.
Step Three: Write Your Page

Search engine optimization is not all about meta tags. In fact, focusing solely on meta keywords will only help you a little bit, and if you go overboard can actually hurt your ranking. Take the following focused approach to search engine optimization:

Include your target phrase twice in the meta title tag <title> Make sure that your title is "clickable". This is what most people see when they search, so keep your title logical and descriptive.Include your target phrase twice in the meta description. This description is used by most search engines as a short paragraph below the clickable title, make sure it extends on the title, and doesn't just repeat what the title says.Include your target phrase in the meta keywords. Don't flood your keywords, use just a few, and don't get carried away.Include your target phrase in the title or headline for your page. Write that headline using a header tag for your headlines, as search engines often weight words in these tags higher.Include your target phrase in subheads, using header tags here too.

Finally, be sure to include your target phrase in the first paragraph of your page, and twice if you can. Also include it in other locations on the page, including external links, headlines, and sidebars.

Step Four: Promote Your Page

Make sure that when you announce your page, you use your target phrase in both the link text and any explanatory text. If you run a blog, you will want to blog your page with at least two references to your target phrase.

Step Five: Check Your Results and Tweak

If Google or Yahoo don't crawl your site on a regular basis, then submit your page to them. Wait about a week and then go to those engines and test your search engine optimization target phrase. Your goal should be to get to the first or second page of search results for your target phrase.

Search Engine Optimization Isn't Rocket Science

It's more like magic, in many ways, but there are ways to get your pages to show up higher in search rankings, and these five tips should help you to improve your search engine optimization.

How to build SEO marketing campaign

Building a brand is not an easy thing to do. Branding involves many related activities even when building your website, and designing your marketing campaigns.

Pay Per Click, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Banner Advertising, Mobile Search Marketing, forum postings and last but definitely not least, "Search Engine Optimization". All of these contribute to the success of your online marketing and branding strategy.
SEO specifically can help your website to be found and easily crawled by search engines, using specific standards in your source code. SEO will also help you gain a higher ranking in search engine results based on relevant keywords.

The basics of SEO are actually quite easy to understand. SEO can be generally categorized into 5 different aspects such as: Keyword research, Search engine friendly site development, On-page SEO, Link Building, Analytics.

An SEO Newbie Guideline

Here's the thing, you should NEVER put all your eggs in one basket. I use a wide variety of sources to create backlinks. 99% of them are very good quality sources.

Article Distribution

The first thing I almost always do is write and distribute a quality and spun article. When I first started I was broke so I would write it, spin it, and then distribute it myself using Article Marketing Robot.

Nowadays, I pay other people to do all of that for me. You can find some great services on SEO forums like this one which will do this for you too.

Some people will disagree with me but I promise you that if done correctly, article marketing is one of the most powerful SEO tactics you can use.

What to know:

1. Articles should be spun at the sentence level as well as the word level.

2. Google doesn't check for grammar at this time but it does not like a lot of spelling errors.

3. The article has to be spun at a very minimum of 100%. I mean that is the absolutely bare minimum too. A well spun article should be more like 200 - 500% spun though.

4. If you are outsourcing the distribution, make sure the articles are going to be submitted to at least 2 or 3 of the bigger private blogging networks.

Every google update seems to nerf Article Directories a little bit more and it does tend to make them go out of business. There are not anywhere near as many quality Directories today as there were two years ago so to make up for the lack of quality and quantity, these private blogging networks are a must.

Social Bookmarks

While some people will say that you shouldn't mass SB your money site, I have done it to more than 100 websites and never once had a problem.

What to know:

1. One of the reasons I haven't had a problem is because I screen the service. I'd rather have fewer high quality SB's than hundreds of low quality SB's.

2. There are some good services that will submit to a few hundred good SB marking sites but if your website is newer, you need to make sure they will drip feed the backlinks in. You don't want them to all hit your site at once.

3. Some of my favorite services give about 50 high quality SB's and then blog comment or forum post 1 - 3k backlinks to the SB's creating a 2 tier structure. This has worked very well for me.

Forum Profiles

At one point in time, creating a billion Forum Profiles was a very powerful strategy. Not so much any more.

Google knows if you have a backlink at some russian cartoon forum and your website is about Weight Loss, it's probably not relevant.

Also most forum profiles are very bare and Google has now greatly devalued backlinks that are not surrounded by content.

That being said, I still like to have 50 - 100 high pr forum profiles built for my money site. It still shows diversity if nothing else and Google likes that.

In addition to creating diversity, it's also a good source of some high PR backlinks even if they aren't as powerful as they once were.

What to know:

1. Find a service or your own forums that will allow you to post some content on your profile page. It will increase the odds that your profile gets indexed and also help make your backlink more powerful

.EDU & .GOV

A lot of people will say that Matt Cutts said these backlinks aren't worth more. I say B.S.

Of course Matt Cutts is going to publicly state that. It helps keep the stampede down. What Google says and what is actually true are not always the same thing though. Google is a business and like all businesses it will release to the public what it feels is in it's best interest.

You shouldn't be trying to go hogwild with .edu/.gov links anyway, it could look really fishy really fast.

However, in my experience, it does seem to be of benefit to occasionally get a couple of these.

What to know:

1. Go for real .edu and .gov backlinks. .edu.xx and .gov.xx does not seem to be a benefit. That may just be my mind playing tricks on me and not a fact but that's certainly the way it feels to me.

Web 2.0 Properties

These are great! I like to build at least 3 sites.

1. Squidoo

2. Wordpress

3. Blogger

and backlink those sites as well. You can do more, I usually buy a bulk package where I get 10 - 50 built but when I was just starting and broke, I manually built on these 3.

What to know:

1. If you really want to maximize your web 2.0 sites you need to build backlinks to them too. Just building on them and putting in a backlink to your main site is not enough.

2. You need to make sure whatever content is on them is unique. Don't use a rehashed article. It's ok to spin a brand new article for them if it's spun properly, but make sure each site is unique. A well spun article being distributed to 3 - 50 sites should be great!

What to never do!

1. Don't buy mass blog comments, forum profiles, forum comments, untested mass SB submissions or anything else that comes in MASS form unless you have tested on a website that you can afford to get sandboxed or penalized.

2. Don't buy mass anything on a newer website.

Here is the list of 10 latest & frequently asked technical SEO

1. Which are the most important area to include your keywords?

– Page title and Body text are the most important areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.

2. What are webmaster tools?

– Webmaster tools is a free service by Google from where we can get free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.

3. What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?

– Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.


4. What is the best criterion to identify the value of a backlink?

– The authority of the domain, quality of the content on the page where the backlink is provided and then the page rank of the website.

5. What is keyword proximity?

– Keyword Proximity is a measurement criteria of the closeness of the keywords within the Page Title, Meta Description and Body Text.

6. What is keyword prominence?

– Keyword prominence is the location of the keywords in the page title, meta description and body text

7. Difference between exit rate and bounce rate?

– Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leaves a particular website just after visiting a single page on this and exit rate refers to the percentage of people who leaves from a particular page.


8. What are Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors?

– Crawl errors provides the information about the URL’s of your website which are not accessible but linked from somewhere.

9. What is a landing page?

– A landing page is a page in the website which is designed to attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buy a service or the product by reading few lines of important information about that particular service or the product on that page.

10. How to handle the duplicate page in the website?

– using canonical tag.

How To Increase Traffic (and keep it)

When I have a question about Google and SEO, I try to minimize the problem. Let's say there are 10 pages of unique content on the some subject to appear in top result for some keyword. Why should Google give you credit and not 9 others? Hmm... let's see...

Remember this: things you are in control of as a web master are less important than things you are not in control of as a web master. Anyone can create unique content. Just write a lot of random words and stuff paragraphs with keywords. It doesn't really matter that much. And why should it?

People would never use Google if that's the kind of unique content people would find when they are searching. Google is well aware of these types of manipulations, more so than many people realize...

This makes sense because Google certainly doesn't want you to control your own success. Their job is to determine a set of circumstances and behavior patterns that validate your content as relevant to the entered keywords.

From my personal experience, here are some of the realizations I made over a period of time that matter if you want to build traffic:

+1 point for Your content is unique
Yes, it's a plus, but so what? Most content is unique anyway! So it's not that important if we really think about this...

I would say that the following is more important:
+1 point for Relevant content. (Relevance is determined by anchor text, I'll get back to this later, that's the key rule for Google, because ideally the web master does not have control over anchor text. Other people use anchor text to describe your website, not you.)
+1 point Backlinks are more important than your content.
+1 point The content of the page you are backlinked from must be relevant.
I am sure Google pays attention to this, too.
+1 point A site about cheese links to a site about cars Ok, still counts, but not as good as:
+2 point A site about cars links to a site about cars
I came to the realization above after I noticed that they actually can determine what your website is about, what its niche is, without you supplying them any information directly. They have a tool that shows advertisers what the site is about. And somehow, they determine that. Yes, it's to do with your keywords, but other things as well.
+1 point There are keywords in the title of the page you are linking from
+1 point post 100 links back to your site in 1 day
+100 points post 1 link every day for 100 days, every other day
Do you really think that Google doesn't know that it's possible to backlink 1 site in 1 day with 10000 links using robots? Sure they do! So, they take TIME in consideration. I assure you that they absolutely do. But if they don't, they are stupid. I don't think Google is stupid.

+1 point backlink anchor stackability
This one I invented myself after observations... What I mean by this is... let's say 10 sites links back to your site as
{a href = "yoursite"}car{/a}
and another 5 site links back to your site as
{a href = "yoursite"}red{/a}
This helps your web page to be more relevant for "red car", because you get +10 for "car" and +5 for "red".
I am a software engineer myself and have thought about these problems from the programming point of view... this looks like a very legitimate idea.

Power of link anchor text
Additionally, many people know this, but if you search for "click here", you will find Adobe.com, because there are so many links saying "click here" pointing to adobe, that Google thinks that what it's about. Is Adobe.com about "click here"? I don't think so. It's about software and products like Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, etc. But this tells us that anchor text is incredibly powerful above all others.

So, even if you have unique content about anything, as long as there are backlinks that use anchor text... that anchor text will define what the site is about... more than your unique content itself!

I don't know everything about SEO, I am sure there are other important things Google keeps track of I don't know about.