Building Backlinks With The “Coffee Filter” Strategy

Posted on Apr 12, 2010 by Tommy to SEO

Among the necessary on-site optimization factors, building backlinks (or inbound links) is the most important
thing you can do off-site to improve your search engine rankings.

Now, there are many theories and opinions on how to build backlinks. And there are a few that work; a few that have withstood the “test of time.”

Besides gaining natural backlinks from public relations efforts or just being a nationally recognized, public company,
you do need to be actively building backlinks to your website(s).

The good ol’ fashioned “backlink request” is quite effective, but can also be…well, it IS very time-consuming and tedious work (if you would like a further explanation of the system we use for backlink requests, just post a comment and I’ll create a quick tutorial for you).

What I want to talk to you about today is something I like to call the “Coffee Filter” Strategy. Now, I’m just going to go ahead and say that I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this, and this is also a combination of other strategies I’ve learned over the years. But, the marketer in me likes to give things cool names like the “Coffee Filter” Strategy.

That being said, this strategy revolves around the idea of “caffeinating” up your existing backlinks (and the backlinks you get from now on). In other words, we’re going to build backlinks to our backlinks.

So, why “Coffee Filter?”

As marketers, SEO’s, designer’s, etc., we are pretty much obsessed with our coffee and/or tea (shout out to Tazo Awake). And, because of that fact, this illustration will be easier for you to understand.

Without the filter, you would end up with a pot full of nasty coffee grounds. However, if you had no coffee grounds, you would just have…well, hot water (and if that’s what does it for you, then by all means, be my guest).

But I think the majority of us would agree that we don’t want either of the following: 1) a delightful cup of coffee laced with ground coffee beans, or 2) a comfy cup of hot water.

That being said, the filter is what provides us with the opportunity to create better tasting, less-gritty cups of coffee.

Here’s a table of how the coffee-making relates to backlinking:

So, simply put, you bookmark, ping, and RSS aggregate (backlink to) the links pointing directly back to your site,
thus “caffeinating” the power of those links. This allows your direct backlinks to act as filter for the thousands of
bookmark and ping-type of links that are indirectly pointing back to your website.

Right about now you may be thinking that I’m full of it and this is a bunch of “hot water.”

So, let me give you a quick example of how I used this strategy in “real life” (haha).

Last week I wrote a blog post about creating gold text with Photoshop. I targeted the keyword phrase: “photoshop gold text tutorial” (which has 1,330,000 competing results). After writing the blog post, I created a Squidoo lens that allowed me to put an anchor-text, DoFollow link back to the blog post permalink. I then bookmarked both the blog post permalink and the Squidoo lens. Result? This whole week my post has been on page 1 of Google for my targeted keyword phrase and out of 1,330,000 competing results. It’s also brought 107 unique visitors to our blog since last week.

So, I encourage you to at least give this a try, put your own spin on it and find something that works. Test, test, test!

(And use Firefox.)

Talk soon,

Tommy

PS. Amazing bookmarking plug-in to help save you time (AddThis) click here to check it out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4076

Tags: backlinks, search engine rankings, SEO

The Bread and Butter Theory: SEO and Outbound Links

Posted on Mar 18, 2010 by Tommy to SEO

So, Rick and I were having a conversation the other day about the many nuances of outbound links and their effect – or lack there of – on search engine rankings. Yes, we may have been travelling down the “rabbit trails” of the topic a little too far, but we did manage to derive an interesting theory out of our speculation.

Introducing the “Bread and Butter Theory of Outbound Links” by Tommy Bussey and Rick Maggio, understanding this will be the best thing you’ve learned about Search Engine Optimization since sliced bread…

Now, through the course of our discussion on this topic we journeyed down a few of the beaten paths of search engine optimization; not forgetting page rank, quantitative back linking, qualitative back linking, on page optimization and the rest of the gang. For some reason, we ended up discussing the importance – or triviality – of outbound linking.

You may have heard that linking out from your site can hurt your search engine rankings. Well, there’s not much truth to this rumor. Obviously, if you have 1,000 links from your site to web properties that encourage toddlers to play in traffic and other “less-than-reputable” topics and practices, you may experience some (sarcastic) poor search engine rankings. But linking out to other websites that are reputable will not hurt your website.

So, what is really important to know about outbound links? Well, you need to start thinking of outbound links in terms of “slices of bread.” Now, at the same time, you need to think of the authority of the sites linking back to you as “butter.” If you can consistently get links back to your site from sites with lots of authority (butter) and fewer outbound links (slices of bread) your website (slice of bread) will receive more authority (butter) and satisfy the algorithms (appetites) of the search engines in a more pleasing manner. Why? Because with less slices of bread (outbound links) there’s more butter (authority) to spread on your slice of bread (your website).

Feel free to take a look at this chart I quickly put together to illustrate the bread and butter theory

Talk soon,

Tommy

Tags: search engine rankings, SEO, THAT agency

Why Are My Rankings Dropping Off? Part 3

Posted on Jan 12, 2007 by Melanie to SEO

After discussing On and Off Site factors that effect your search engine rankings in my previous posts I’ve found some additional that you may want to keep in mind.

Make sure that your web server is reliable, not to mention fast. When a search engine spider visits your site and your server does not respond fast enough, then your web pages won’t be listed in search engines. For that reason, it is important to choose a reliable host. Sometimes you get when you pay for when it comes to cheap hosting so make sure you go with a quality server.

You should also consider that Google will put your web site into the sandbox if you have a new web site or if you change your web pages. The sandbox is a holding area in the indexes of Google until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence. What does this mean? Well it can take up to eight weeks until you get regular rankings for your pages on Google. Ask, Yahoo and MSN have similar filters.

Most of the time the only thing you can do is to wait. If you have optimized web page content and good incoming links, you will get high search engine rankings. It just might take a while until you’re out of the sandbox.

The most important thing to realize and and understand, is that it takes some time until search engines pick up new pages. Search engines have to visit your web pages, they have to evaluate the found pages, they have to build a new index and then they have to publish the new index. Depending on the search engine, this might take 4-12 weeks. If you already have other pages indexed by a search engine, new pages might get indexed faster but that’s not always the case.

If you experience a random drop in your web page rankings, don’t panic. Search engines like to test new ranking algorithms. Sometimes you will need wait 2-4 weeks to find out if your rankings have really dropped.

Frustrating? Of course it is. Unfortunately if you have everything taken care of on your site and you’ve done everything right you are still at the mercy of Google’s latest update, Yahoos new ranking algorithm or MSN’s search spider habits. Stay vigilante and be patient and you’ll be happy with your results.

Tags: search engine rankings

Offsite Factors to Consider When Your Rankings Drop

Posted on Dec 27, 2006 by Melanie to SEO

Last time we discussed the factors on your site that affect your rankings. Today we’re going to explore the most important offsite issue, links. The number and the type of web sites that link to your site are very important. If you want to achieve higher rankings, try to get as many links from related web sites as possible. It’s not only important that many other web sites link to yours, it’s also important that the links are from related sites and that the link texts contain keywords that are related to the keywords for which you want to have high rankings.

If you had good rankings that suddenly dropped and none of the on-site factors mentioned in my previous post apply to your site, then it is very likely that search engines have re-evaluated the links to your site. If this is the case, the search engine will either think that the links to your site are not from related sites or other sites have better links than you so in turn listing them higher.

Other sites don’t necessarily have to have more links than you. They just need to links that are related to the keyword for which you want to have high rankings. In that case, you should try to get new links from related sites that contain your keyword.

Stay Tuned for the exciting Conclusion of The Lost Rankings Trilogy.

Tags: search engine rankings

Have Your Rankings Dropped Off?

Posted on Dec 15, 2006 by Administrator to SEO

If so there are a few things you can do to help get you back where you need to be.

First let’s look at some On-Site Factors:

It is very important that your web pages contain no spam. Sometimes when making changes to your site you have changed something on your pages that might be considered spam.

Make sure that your web site doesn’t use hidden text, keyword stuffing, cloaking or too many redirects. Search engines don’t like it and visitors are becoming keener on what happens in front of them. They don’t like it either.

If you have new pages that aren’t listed, make sure that you have enough text. Search engines need text to index web pages. Overusing frames can cause your information to be passed over by spiders.

Google(as well as every other major search engine) has difficulty indexing dynamically created pages. If you must use dynamically created pages and if your web page URLs contain questions marks, the & symbol and other special characters, consider rewriting your URLs so that your pages appear as static pages.

Make sure that your robots.txt file allows search engines to index your web site. A broken robots.txt file can send search engine spiders away from your pages.

It’s also important that you have plain text links on your web pages. If you only use image or JavaScript links on your pages, chances are that search engine spiders cannot follow the links so that it looks as if your web site consisted of only one page. Spiders love plain text links.

You should also make sure that your web pages have valid HTML code. While most HTML errors don’t cause problems, some of them can prevent search engine spiders from indexing your site. Validation is very helpful in this case.

Next time: Off-Site Factors and how they affect your rankings.

Tags: search engine rankings