Every Webmaster is familiar with the power of inbound link from relevant sites and web pages how it passes the page rank or link juice. And many believes that Google solely relay on these links while assigning page rank or authority. Which is not entirely true, these links certainly play an important role in your sites SEO, but they are not the only important links. Your contextual internal links are equally important, Infect Well planed Internal Linking Strategy has greater chance to secure your place in Top 10 result in Google SEPRs.

Internal Links helps you get all of your pages indexed in the search engines by reminding search engine spiders that your old pages still exist and it is worth giving some value to. It improves the usability of your blog as well as And helps you escape Google’s Sandbox prison.

Use Something Better Then Click Here:

Anchor text has an impact upon how your site ranks for those words. It tells search engines (and your reader) what information the link contains, if you use throw away phrase like”click here” as the Anchor text people may click on it (I wouldn’t though) because it is great calls to action, but provide very little in the way of telling the search engines (or the visitor) what the linked page is all about.

Example 1: If I link to my post about Google send box effect post like this.
“To know How to Deal With Google Sandbox Effect Click Here”

You will click on it to read more about Google sandbox, but Google won’t pass value to the destination page for the term “Google Sandbox Effect” it will pass value for “click here”. (Do I want to link higher for click here? Of course not)

Example 2: But If I link to same post like this.
“Follow this link to know How to Deal With Google Sandbox Effect”

You will still click on it, and Google will pass value to the destination page for the Phrase How to Deal With Google Sandbox Effect, as well as Google Sandbox Effect. Because it got my desired Keyword as anchor text and call to action. And you know exactly what to expect when you click that link.

Target Long Tail Keyword in Anchor text:

Competitive keywords require domain age, trusted links from a variety of sources, while Long tail keywords are easier to rank for, and if done right it can drive more traffic then to 10 keywords of your niche, instead of targeting top keywords target less competition Long Tail version (like Blog Search Engine Optimization) rather than targeting core competitive keyword SEO.

rel=”nofollow” Irrelevant Links:

it is wise to nofollow pages like FAQs, Privacy Policies or Disclaimers, which is not relevant to your overall blog content, to control the flow of link juice and point it to more relevant and important pages. For Example first link in anchor text explanation point is nofollow while 2nd link with descriptive anchor text is dofollow

Use Link Title:

Link Title tag lets you adds short description about link’s destination page when user hover cursor on it. its like an alt tag in images. Now this won’t help your SEO, but it will surely help you improve your Blog’s Usability, Use title tag in link while linking to Category or Archive pages which usually don’t have much to add in anchor text.

How to use title tags?
The HTML code for making my name into an anchor is <a href="your link" TITLE="short description of destination page"> Your Anchor Text <a>. This tells your reader what to expect from following the link.

Use Breadcrumb Trail:

In my previous post about 15 Blog Usability Tips we saw how it influence usability of your blog and help your reader navigate on your site, but breadcrumb is not only a navigation technique, it’s a hierarchical linking to more important pages of your Blog(site). Which increase the chance for your important page to rank higher for your most important keyword phrase.

Usability Benefits of Internal Linking:

When done right internal linking can improve your blogs over all usability. By linking to relevant content to your readers. Its more effective than your blogs main navigation.

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Jim Boykin: is a search engine optimization expert whom is also the founder and CEO of We Build Pages. Jim has a blog at www.jimboykin.com where he chats about internet marketing and link building issues.

• Achieve Higher Rankings and Stay out of Google Hell Via Optimized Internal Linking.
• LinkBait alone won’t do it. You need Link Ninjas.
• If it’s not a Pagerank 4 or higher, it’s worthless.
• The Historical Importance of Backlinks.

Rand Fiskin: is SEOmoz’s CEO, and co-founder, as well as the primary blogger for the site and the architect of most of the tools and resources on SEOmoz’s

• 5 Reasons You Should Link Out to Others From Your Website
• 21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post
• The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business
• Footer Link Optimization for Search Engines and User Experience
• Tactical SEO: How Many Terms/Phrases Should I Target on a Single Page?

Jeffrey Smith: is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of SEO Design Solutions.

• Theme Density – The Ultimate SEO Ranking Factor
• How to Transfer On Page Authority
• SEO, Marketing and Other Metrics that Matter
• SEO Web Design, Harnessing the Power of Alt Text and Images
• Is Content, Timing and Links the Secret Sauce for SEO?

Mani Karthik: an “Internet Enthusiast” that’s how he love to be called. Is a SEo practitioner from India, whose life goal is to help people optimize their websites to get high ranks on Google, Yahoo, & MSN.

• How To Build Trust With Google And Other Search Engines?
• How Can You Change The Way Your Site Info Appears In Google SEPRs?
• 9 Things You Could Do To Screw Up Your Page Rank.
• 18 Steps You should Consider To Get Higher Page Rank For Your Blog

What is rel=”canonical”?

It’s an element that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If you have multiple versions of a single page, which is very common in wordpress blog, this new element allows webmasters to specify which version search engines should use for the content. In short it tells Google and other search bots to consider all those pages and one. It also helps you consolidate authority, link popularity and Pagerank to your preferred version.

How do I use it?

The simplest way to add this tag in your html code is to install Canonical URL Links Wordpress Plugin and activate it. But don’t worry if your site is not WP blog, implementing rel=”canonical” is not a rocket science. You just need to add following tag in to header section where you put Title attribute and Meta Description tag. To Specify the canonical version.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.bloggerslab.com" />

This will tell search bots that the page it indexing should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.bloggerslab.com . And that all of the link & content measures the engines apply should technically go to that URL.

What are the benefits of this tag?

In past we all have faced the issue of multiple version of smaller content on various url. For instance all your blog post can be accessed from author page, categories, tags and sitemap (one like mine on Navigation bar) which creates big problems (confusion would be batter phrase for it)

• Search engines can’t determine which version it should include/exclude from its index. (This leads to another puzzle)
• Search engines can’t decide whether to direct the link metrics such as link popularity, link juice, authority, etc. to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions.
• Search engines don’t know which version(s) to rank higher in SERP.

When this happens, you suffer huge rankings and traffic losses and engines suffer lowered relevancy. In order to sort out this issue Google and other big search engines have come up with this new link element.

Will this affect my internal page rank?

This tag works only with very similar or identical content, so it won’t send all the link value from your entire site to your home page. Google have applied this safeguard to prevent abuse by other methods such as redirects.

You should use this tag if:

• If your web page is a blog that displays similar content on different pages such as categories, author page and tags.
• If you are selling product or services such as SEO or Web templates. That requires you to put one product in many categories or sub-categories.

This new tag won’t completely eliminate duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier. Webmasters and SEO practitioners have been asking for help with these issues for a long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition.

You can read more about rel=”canonical” at Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Search Blog and Live Search Webmaster Center

Other Interesting Posts
Bloggers confusion: How Long A Blog Post Should Be
Blogging Obstacles And How To Overcome It.
How To Make Your Reader Fall In Love With Your Blog
How to make your Blog SEO friendly

Image Credit: http://www.businessol.com

Write Promote Track and Optimize these are the four magic mantras every successful bloggers use it works for them. And if you use it well it will work four you as well.

Create contents:
Rest of the article doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to create unique original contents. The best way to produce unique and valuable content that other would love to read begins with reading other blogs inside and outside your niche. This will give you idea what kind of contents works. Which types of titles attracts more user attentions. Yes having a killer title that work is very important. But you need something worth under it. Ask these questions to your self as you write your contents.

Promote your Content:
Now this is something you really need to be careful with. I have seen many bloggers who have take wrong path of blackhat. There are easy way like social networking sites such as Digg Mixx Del.ici.us Stumbleupon which can get you flood of traffic in no time.

But there are some other ways worth considering.
First of all make your every single post a search engine friendly post. Doing it from scratch is much easier then doing it later. Use good title tag description and keywords (you can do it with all in one SEO Pack) these three things can make over 20% difference to the traffic your post receive.

Second when you refer to other’s article or blog let the author of that blog know you have linked to them (Don’t expect them to discover it themselves ) a simple Email or IM offline can work here.

Track your content and traffic trend:
This is the most important part of blogging cycle and perhaps the most ignored by many bloggers. Creating and promoting content is important. But knowing your traffic trend and what type of content works and what doesn’t is equally important.

There are hundreds of free tracking sites like Google Analytic 103bees and Hittail ( I personally like Google Analytic and 103bees) lets say your site gets maximum hits on weekends, use that knowledge to your advantage and save your best post for weekend. Of course this is just scratching the surface of what can be done with tracking applications. There many reason for using tracking application. No matter which application you use or how you use but pleas use something.

Optimize your site:
Learn from your previous efforts. And use it to make your next post even batter. And Build Upon What You Build.

Don’t get me wrong here, but you should write your content from humans point of view rather search crawler’s. I know few people who write exclusively for search spiders (stuffing their contents with too many keywords) and end up with massy, unclear and boring content. But you can save your self from such blunders if you are aware of some basic SEO principles. You can tweak your contents without sacrifying quality and users reading experience. Here are such tweaks that will make your content search engine friendly as well as user friendly.

Use keywords that readers search for:
Lets see if you were writing this article which of this 2 title you would use?
1) How to write search engine friendly article? Or 2) how to write search engine friendly contents?From readers point of view both titles are probably the same but if you picked 2^nd title your chance of receiving search engine traffic is higher because the term “content” is searched 49 times more then articles.

Focus on one topic:
It can’t be batter then that if you can write about several topics in one article and rank high on Google SERP for all of those topics. But that happens once in a blue moon. So focus on one topic at a time this will ensure that you are using keywords with consistency.

Use your important keywords in title:
Your title is perhaps the most important factor on search engine algorithm. Because Blogger and Wordpress (if you are using custom permalink structure) include your title text in URL. And Google use it in search engine result pages. And keyword reach title gives hint to your prospective reader what they can expect from your article. And it indirectly suggest an anchor text to other who might want to link back to your post.

Use keywords in Opening paragraph:
Your opening paragraph is crucial from reader’s and search crawler’s point of view. Well described opening paragraph will encourage your visitor to read further. And just like Title your 1^st paragraph is very important from SEO point of view because Google use it as description of your content and includes it in SERPs under Title (usually first 50 words of your opening paragraph).

Alt and Title tags:
Whenever using image in your post you must include title and alt attributes search engine use it identify images and for keyword density process

These are my 5 ingredients for SEO what is your recipe for SEO

Related Post: How To Make Your Blog SEO Friendly

Change permalink structure
By default Wordpress permalinks are like “yourblog.com/?p=12” like your readers those numbers at the end of url does not make any sense to search spider either. But as I said we wordpress publishers are very lucky. You can change this structure from your control panel to do so follow these steps
Control panel >>> Setting >>> Permalink

Here u gets 5 choices for permalink structure

Default yourblog.com/?p=123
Day and name yourblog.com/2008/06/24/sample-post/
Month and name yourblog.com/2008/06/sample-post/
Numeric yourblog.com/archives/123
Custom Structure

Custom Structure offers you the ability to create a various URL structure for your permalinks and archives. U can use different tags to create your custom permalink

%postname%
A clean version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI

%category%
A clean version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.

%author%
A sanitized version of the author name. (Use this if you are Darren Rowse or Brian Clark)

Blogger’s lab Suggestion
While all the pro blogger insist using only postname tag for your permalink. I would recommend using category tag along with postname. This will give you batter permalink as well as wide rang of keywords in your URL

And here some more tags you can use to create your custom permalink structure

Note:You must change your Permalink structure in the initial stages when you start a blog. If you already have bunch of post runing on your blog i would suggest you to install Permalink Redirection Plugin

Customize single post title
Page title is an important part of SEO. Google includes it in search results. And you don’t want Google to display your blogs name in every search result rather then your killer post title.
The most appropriate for single post page would be post title or post title followed by your blog name (i.e. post title | your blog name) rather then unnecessary stuffs like Your Blog >> Blog Archive >> Post Title
Use this code to achieve such title structures

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();}
else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>

This code will display your blog name on home page post title on single post page and category and blog name on category pages.

Make most of your Footer
Footer is a bunch of text displayed at the bottom of your pages. And it is probably the last thing that search spider would see. Footers usually look like this
Wordpress blog © Blog Name PassionDuo Blue theme by Dailyblogtips (if u are using free theme like I do)
Adding some keyword to the footer along with your blog name (Bloggers Lab | SEO Tips) or links to your blog categories will keep Google spider on your blog for little longer time
Wordpress publisher can edit their footer by navigating to Design >>> Theme Editor >>> footer.php. But don’t spam your footer with too many keywords and links.

These tricks will enhance your blogs appearance as well as make it more users friendly and search engine friendly

Other Interesting Posts
Finally the Duplicate content issue is sorted forever.
5 Ingredients For Batter Search Engine Optimization
Are you Slow Poisoning Your Blog?

Is it Sandbox effect or Google Penalty?
Before we talk about tactics to defend your site against Google Sandbox. It is important to know if your site is suffering from Sandbox Effect or Google sentenced you its famous penalty for unethical link building practice.

If your site is serving Google penalty your site won’t appear in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) even for your own domain name (Probably the reason why John Cow list 1st for John Chow) or the less important keyword searches. And the site won’t show any pagerank or grey bar on Google tool bar. While Google sandbox filter is customized to concern itself with the more competitive keywords as they are more likely to have spam sites. It does not restrict your site from appearing in SERPs. If your site is targeting less competitive keywords then it will probably appear in 4th or 5th page of search result.

How to get out of Sandbox?
Time is the only escape from the Sandbox. Your stay in Sandbox may vary from one month to six months depending on competitiveness of your keywords (three to four months is average duration).

Start promoting your site from the day u creates.
Many SEO gurus will advise you to start your SEO and Site Promotion activates once your site is ready for your audience. I say start your SEO the moment you post your first blog post. The motto is to spread the word about your blog as soon as possible. Worry about improving it later. The time that you spend in the Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website.

Continue link building
It is best to continue adding keyword reach contents and inbound links to your site while it’s in Sandbox. The links would be well matured and ready to pass along their full value of PageRank and link popularity, as the site comes out of the Google Sandbox.

Avoid Blackhat tactics
BlackHat SEO tactics are very tempting and can get you quick success in no time. But they do more damage then they are worth for. Avoid techniques that involves keyword stuffing or cloaking Google search algorithms it may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual.

What made Google create the Sandbox?
SEO practitioners believes Google created the Sandbox filter for new sites to stop spam (And the innocent Webmaster paying the price) sites that purchase inbound links to rank high for their important keywords and phrases from the date of its launch. Google looks suspiciously at high number of inbound links pointing to a site from the beginning. And such inbound links are not considered as natural. Another reason is that new sites would use various tactics like paid reviews to go up to the top of the search results, and get heavy sales (or what ever the purpose of the site) prior to being banned for violating Google’s TOS. To stop such “Blackhat “ SEO practice Google created the filter. Which puts new sites on a probation period, and this effect is usually referred to as the Google Sandbox.

Does Google sandbox really exist?
While many SEO Gurus strongly believes Google Sandbox is not a fantasy. There are SEO practitioners who deny that Google Sandbox exists as a separate filter from other alleged Google filters. Many of them don’t even agree that Google uses filters at all and the Sandbox effect is an illusion. Note that Google has admitted recently that the Sandbox filter is not a hoax and it does exist

Which sites likely to be given a term in the Sandbox?
Well almost all new sites can be placed in sandbox, but new sites betting on highly competitive keywords and keyword phrases suffers more then sites targeting less competitive words. Usually new sites stay 3 to 4 months in Google Sandbox Prison but sites targeting keywords and phrases in high demand face longer term in Google Sandbox.

Is it possible to avoid having your site in the Google Sandbox?
There is no surefire way to bypass Sandbox filter. But targeting non-competitive keywords can compensate your stay in Sandbox at some level. Though non-competitive keywords can be sandboxed but their much shorter say in sandbox goes entirely unobserved. Another possible way to bypass sandbox is to Find and Target Long Tail Keywords for More Search Engine Traffic which not only help you keep your self away from Sandbox filter it will also help you increase your natural search engine traffic

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