Of the well-known SEO techniques to optimize a site to be found in search engine results, one is the off-page technique of link building. Off-page means the links are not on your website – they are links originating on pages on the Internet (on other people’s websites or in web directories) that link to your site. These are also called backlinks – they link “back” to your website or blog. Backlinks are how websites build “authority” in web search results – having more links to your site gives it authority and will make it rank better for search results.

 If any of you know about getting your websites or blogs ranked in search engines (meaning they show up in the first pages of search engines when people search for specific search words or phrases), then you know you need to have links to your site to rank well. So, there are 2 main ways to get these links to your website.

1. Manual links
2. Leveraged links

Manual Links

Manual linking is done by adding your websites as favorites in social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and others. In the past many people did link exchanges to get links. Link exchanges are not popular now – partly due to the fact that they are 2-way links (I link to you and you link to me) which tend to cancel out each other as far as the search engines see them. That means they have little value. More valuable links are 1-way links. They come from a site to yours but you don’t link back to that same website. Other manual links are internal links you can create from one page of your website to another page.

Leveraged Links

One definition of leverage is “exert power or influence on.”  That is what leveraged links do – the increase the power or influence of your website. The best links to get are 1-way links from other websites to your site or your blog. But the better 1-way links would be from sites with high authority (those that have earned search engine trust by having many backlinks, domain age and higher Google page rank or PR) – these are leveraged links and they pass some of the authority to your website.

In a nutshell, having a link from a website with high google PR is equal to many links from non-authority websites. So, the strategy should be to find ways to get those high authority websites to link to your website. 

Link Building Strategies

The link building strategies I am using include social bookmarking, posting to other people’s blogs (with valuable comments – not spammy ones), and using content to generate links – such as with Article Marketing Automation (read the review), which I still highly recommend.

Link building with leveraged links is hot topic right now and I’m sure that I’ll be adding more about this strategy in the future.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, leveraged, link building, links, manual, search engines, SEO

WordPress wasn’t really designed for SEO, but many plugins have been developed to enable better features to make a blog more SEO-friendly. I’ve been using Wordpess as a blogging platform for the last few months and after talking to some friends who wanted this information, I thought I would write about the set of plugins that I have found useful from an SEO perspective.

Not only are these fantastic and free, these WordPress plugins are from all over the world. I have never seen a concise list of recommendations on these, so I thought I would make my own list. I am not saying I am an expert at this point – but I’ll try to share what I have learned so far. Many of these developers have a donate button on their site – if you feel that their plugin has been useful, you may want to make a donation.

You can set up a WordPress blog and never use a plugin. But to do some of the cooler things, and to use the widget ready templates and themes, these plugins extend the capabilities of your blog.

Note: Be aware of the version of WordPress you are using to be sure you download the plugin that is compatible. See: WordPress Plugins Compatibility.

I am going to list the plugins that I use in this post. Future posts will include information about setting up a new WordPress blog and how to upgrade to the latest WordPress version. Another post: http://www.wordpressthemestudio.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-database-backup-and-maintenance is a list of WordPress management plugins (for database backups and maintenance).

First – the plugins I like to use and that I recommend you start with (I’ll make this a list of my top 7 plugins and below that I will explain their use and where to download them):

• All-in-one SEO Pack
• Ultimate Google Analytics
• WordPress Duplicate Content Cure
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Cforms (cformsII)
• Add This (button or drop down)
• Tags to Technorati
  

All in One SEO Pack - Described as “Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.” This plugin helps you add title tags, descriptions and keywords to your blog posts. There are more features you can read about, plus a video tutorial (and you can download it) at: WordPress All In One SEO Pack

Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.  Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin

WordPress Duplicate Content Cure – Whether you believe duplicate content will hurt you (or if such a thing exists) this plugin claims to be a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages. Duplicate Content Cure.

WP-Sticky 1.40 – Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler.  http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/ (You won’t need this with running WP 2.7 and above because those versions have this “sticky” feature built in.)

*Cforms (cformsII) – cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more. http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. WordPress Google Site Map Generator

WP tags to Technorati – Simple plugin to convert WordPress 2.3’s tags to Technorati (’http://technorati.com’) links.  Wordpres Tags to Technorati

Add This (button) – A button that helps readers add your blog to social bookmarking sites. http://www.addthis.com/

Plugins for ads, adsense, and ad management – I doubt you need to use all of these. I’m going to use them one at a time to test them. A note about these ad managment plugins: I need to explore them more and write more about each in a later post.

Adsense Manager – Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your WordPress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colours.  http://www.mutube.com/

WP admanager – This new Plug-in enables you to make use of much improved Banner management features at WordPress blog. https://www.ohloh.net/p/wp-admanager/packages

Adserve - AdServe is the advertising server for WordPress. You could setup your banner campaigns using different sized banners, set available impressions and count resulting clicks! Optionally AdServe links ads to blog users so that one could check the campaign results within the Dashboard!  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adserve/

This is the basic list of plugins I like, but I’ll probably be adding to this list as I start learning about and using more of them.

*Note: Cforms II has a new update (version 10.5) but it requires that your server is running PHP5.

Technorati Tags: best wordpress plugins, blog help, SEO, WordPress Plugins