Followup Post: The SEO Link Wheel – How I Got The #1 Spot For My Keyword

How To Build an SEO Link Wheel

The key to building a good link wheel is to use multiple properties, and link each one to only one other article. The larger the link wheel, the more diverse the links and the better the overall outcome of the linking. The diagram below shows popular Web 2.0 sites that are free, and are a great place to start your first linkwheel.

Each article is linked to one article, but never linked back to the same article, all to create one-way backlinks to each of the properties.

Link Wheel Experts

As link wheels have become more popular, it’s important that you find the sites that haven’t turned their links into Nofollow. This can be a tedious task for the average user, but with firms like SEOLinkWheelers.com, they are 100% dedicated to building link wheels. They make monthly audits of their 52 web 2.0 sites and remove all of the sites that are Nofollow, and add on additional sites to ensure the links pass the highest value.

When making your own audits, you should look for the Web 2.0 sites that showup high for your search terms. For our eCommerce store, My Salon Tools, popsugar.com has a lot of beauty related pages ranking high, so we selected that site for our linkwheel.

You can do the same by doing some searches in your vertical and finding the web 2.0 sites you can use.

My Link Wheel

I created a link wheel to help increase the SERPs on my eCommerce store — http://mysalontools.com/. I’m targeting the keyword “shears” and “scissors” and am linking back to my store through the following articles:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Different-Types-of-Salon-Shears

http://salontools.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/how-to-choose-your-first-haircutting-shears/

http://mysalontools.onsugar.com/4502005

http://www.squidoo.com/haircuttingscissors

http://salonscissors.blogspot.com/

By linking back to my articles on this post, I am also helping to build the corresponding back links to each of my different spokes, and in turn increasing the overall value of my SEO wheel.

Building Backlinks to Each Spoke

For each of the spokes on my link wheel, I need to make sure they have plenty of backlinks as well, so that my overall net value for My Salon Tools is maximized.

For each of the articles, I submitted them to Feed Ping, a service that pings ~100 blog services and gets Google to index your articles faster. Additionally, for each of my articles, I submit them to as many social bookmarking as I can. My shortlist of bookmarks is:

Delicious
Digg
Mixx
Simpy
Plurk
Twitter (follow me @andrewwise)

For Twitter, a great resource is TwitterFeed.com. You give it an RSS feed and it automatically posts the latest updates from the site on a Twitter account (or 2).

Creating Sidecars on Your Main Linkwheel

A typical SEO wheel is created using one article from different sites, but a “sidecar” is creating a wheel within a wheel. So in this example, I have Squidoo as being one of my spokes. A sidecar would be creating 6 different articles within Squidoo, all interlinking to each other, and then out again to (eg) HubPages.

The more spokes, and the more sidecars you have, the better your overall results are going to be, it’s just a matter of a little bit of organization.

Hopefully this article was useful to you, and if it was, please thank me by linking back to my article, and helping me spread the SEO gospel to more people

Hiring a Linkwheel Company

So linkwheels are great ways to build backlinks, but who has an extra 2 hours they can spend writing all their own content, auditing all these sites, and all filling in all these forms? I know I don’t, so I’d like to recommend you checkout SEOLinkWheelers.com. All packages are completed in 2-3 business days and you get a tracking spreadsheet as soon as you order that lets you follow as the order is completed.

How do you make a link directory? You can pay for the scripts or you can use a free plugin designed for WordPress.

But why would you want to create a web directory? Isn’t it just going to create reciprocal links, which are pretty much worthless? Well, directories are only good for the directory owner, and not the sites listed in the directory.

To create a web directory in WordPress, you need to download the plugin. From there, all you need to do is drop it in your WordPress plugins file, and enable it.

How To Use A Link Directory Effectively

Say you are putting together a health-food related directory. You should solicit webmasters to submit their health-food sites to your directory, and ask them for a reciprocal link.

But you don’t give them the link for your directory. You give them the link for your other site, the one you want to promote. So now you have all of these sites linking back to your main site, and the web directory is filled with a bunch of sites. The sites in the directory don’t do you much good, but over time it can make the directory more useful, and if you put work into it, you can make a useful web directory of health-food related websites.

So now you have a useful web directory, and are getting tons of 1-way links to your main site.

So the next time you see a link directory, realize the guy running it may be a lot smarter thank you think.

But one of the most fundamental elements of any SEO-ed blog is having your header tags organized and placed in the right position.

I having been working very hard to get my blog ranked highly for startup blog but I’ve been missing these crucial tags on my own site.

Check Your Blog For Header Tags

The first step in determining if your blog has the correct tags is to check your source code. To do this, go “view->view source” or hit control+U on your PC or command+U on your Mac.

This is going to bring up the HTML view of your webpage, and you don’t have to know what any of this really means, you’re only looking for the H1 H2 H3 information.

To do this, pull up find on the source code, and search for H1, and H2. If you find them, you’re on the right track, if not, you need to insert them in manually.

Where To Put H1, H2 Tags?

Now that you know where your site does or does not have H1 or H2 tags, you should look for the best place to insert them.

The H1 tag is meant to identify the main title of the page, so your site name or the title of your article should be inserted into the HTML code. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see where my H2 tags were inserted.

For the H2 tags, this is information that subordinate to the main content. For my main homepage, the H1 tags are on my “Headline” story and all of the featured stories have the H2 tags. Depending on your site structure, you may or may not to insert these manually.

If you look at this story in particular, you can see that I’ve used H2 tags while writing it, which will avoid me having to insert H2 tags on my own.

Be Careful of Abuse

Don’t think that inserting H1 and H2 tags all over the site will max out your Google search rankings. You have to me careful when placing them and only make sure they relate to the actual content of your site, because Google will penalize you or even ban you if there are too many of the H1 and H2 tags.

Just making sure they’re in the correct spot will go a long way to getting your blog optimized, and on the frontpage of Google.

Good luck!

Driving traffic to your blog is the key factor in determining whether it’ll be a success or not. I put together 50 tips to drive more traffic to your blog, and these are great for increasing both SEO traffic as well as direct and community traffic.

But SEO is really the lifeblood of your blog. It allows your posts to live on long after they’re published, and let’s you reap the fruit of all your hard work.

Optimize Your Old Blog Posts For SEO

If you’re able to generate traffic from your old blog posts, you’ll see your traffic increase exponentially. As a blogger, your goal is to increase your knowledge in the industry, and as a thought-leader.

Having high-ranking posts, allows more people to be exposed to your content and will yield you overall higher traffic numbers.

Analyze Your Best Performing Posts

Looking at your Google Analytics graphs, you can find what posts are bringing in the most traffic via Google, and from there, you can see which keywords are bringing in the most traffic.

Type those terms into Google, and see which of your stories show up. Hopefully you’ll be on the front page or first page of Google for those search terms.

Regardless, you should have a good idea of which posts are driving the most natural, organic search traffic. Once you’ve identified them, you can start your work.

Optimize Your Stories With Specific Keywords

Once you see which keywords are driving the traffic to your posts, you can go back into your story and help emphasize these keywords better.

Perhaps you can add in an extra paragraph talking about your subject in more detail. Also, you can use strong and italics to help your keywords stand out more. This also allows the reader to more easily skim your stories and extract the key points.

Including your keywords in the opening paragraphs and also closing paragraphs helps Google pick up your story better. Also, don’t overwhelm your story with the keywords.

Google looks for natural word search, so use a lot of similar keywords, synonyms, and the general type of language that someone would use when searching for your particular topic.

Reap The Results of Your Hard Work

After optimizing your posts, you will soon start to see these old posts bringing in more and more traffic. If you don’t see the results you want, you should go back and keep updating and altering until you get the achieved results you want.

Also, you can start talking about your old blog posts on blogs, forums, Yahoo! answers and any other area where your community would be interested in learning more about what you have to say.

Optimize Old Blog Posts For Your Sites Keywords

So for those of you looking to optimize your blogs posts for SEO, and achieve higher search engine ranking positions SERP, you should look to go back to your old posts and start optimizing them for the keywords that are driving the most traffic to your blog.

When selecting a WordPress theme, you should have two major concerns. The WordPress theme should be among the best in SEO ranking, that is it allows your stories and articles to have the highest search engine ranking position (SERP) and also allows you the maximum design aesthetics. You want your blog to be ranking highest in Google’s search algorithms and ranking highest in terms of web-design for user preferences.

I’ve been looking to start some small vertical blogs to help bolster my tiny web empire village and am looking for great WordPress themes that are going to rank well in Google and provide little-to-no-maintenance issues for me.

After searching the net, I’ve found 5 themes that I personally consider for my own sites, and wanted to share them with you.

Best WordPress Themes for SEO

PassionDuo Blue
This is actually my favorite, since it has the big placement of the 125 buttons on the side, and although it doesn’t look like much from the screenshot, is a quality building block.

GreenOrnament 1.0

iTheme Clear Blue 1.1

Logi 1.0

MarlexSystems 2.0

The best themes for WordPress are judged by two main levels. How well they rank you in Google and the subsequent SERP they give you, and also the best web design in regards to overall SEO-effect.

The top SEO themes have all of their site structures being very clean, and readable by Google. They will include all of your categories, tags, and stories in easy to read format for the robots on Google including all of the meta and header tags.

Additionally, I would suggest you check out our 50 tips for a high traffic blog, to get you started on your blog marketing and grab the all-in-one SEO plugin as well.

I put together a few test projects, Gainesville Delivery, just to test out the template, and it was really easy to setup, and after a few tweaks, my keywords were optimized to the kilt. When getting everything setup, you must ensure that you change out the Adsense Publisher-ID otherwise you won’t get paid!

For full details on all of the features, as well as a plugin link,

Be sure to head to the author’s page. Download ProSense.

Here are some of the theme features, some of which are currently exclusive to ProSense:

• Separate and Distinct Ad Blocks. The use of distinct theme files for ad codes allows for easy editing and insertion of Adsense units. These ad blocks can also be used to insert other types of advertisements as well and are not solely limited to Adsense use.
• Multiple Ad Display Options. Unlike other Adsense Ready themes, ProSense allows you to choose between either banner or rectangle ads for the single post page, thus allowing you more flexibility when it comes to ad blending.
• Hassle-free convenience and ease of use. You’ll only have to insert your Adsense publisher ID in the default ad units and you’re done. It should only take a minute or two to set up ProSense perfectly.
• Integrated Ad placement on the homepage. Unlike most Adsense ready themes currently available, ProSense blends a 468 x 60 banner unit between the second and third post on the blog homepage.

  This enables you to display relevant ads to search visitors who arrive at your homepage, as they are more likely to scroll and scan through your posts.The inclusion of a well-blended horizontal link unit near the top of the homepage also attracts navigational-style visitor clicks.

• Highly Optimized Ad units on post pages. There are two types of ad blocks on both the top and bottom of the single post page. You can choose between using a 468 x 60 banner and 300 x 250 rectangle at the top of the post or a 468 x 60 banner and 336 x 280 large rectangle at the bottom of the post.

The ability to designate and match different ad units is exclusive to ProSense and is currently not available for other Adsense Ready themes.

• Pre-blended Adsense unit colors. All Adsense unit colors are tweaked to match the blog’s link and background colors. There is absolutely no need for you to spend time picking the appropriate ad colors.
• Search Engine Optimized site structure. ProSense is built from good, clean code that validates well. The CSS positioning is written so that your blog content is prioritized in the source code as this may help to improve search engine crawling and ranking. Dynamic and descriptive title tags are also used for each blog page.
• Compatible with WordPress 2.0+. ProSense has been tested with the latest 2.2 Getz version of WordPress and no problems were experienced.
• Widget-Ready. If you’re a widget lover, you’ll be happy to know that Prosense allows you to easily install and use widgets to complement your content and advertising scheme.

Luckily there’s a great service, offered by GoogleRankings.com that tells you the most common phrase, word, and 3 word phrase to appear on your site.

Part of optimizing your site for SEO is building as much on-site content as you can, with things like writing articles about your particular niche, linking to your social media profiles, and general title and organizational optimization.

Optimizing Your Site For Keyword Placement

The first thing you need to do is optimize your title, found in the header. Next, you want to edit your description and meta keywords, after that, you want to look at your actual blog content itself. Writing articles is a no-brainer, but look at stuff like writer name. I recently adjusted my blog so it shows who the author (andrew wise) is for each article, which increased the number of mentions for my name by 10. Depending on your niche, you can have things like “by gaming-master ‘andrew wise’” (for gaming blogs, etc.). The key thing is putting your keywords in as many places as possible without looking like a broken record.

I’m going to be delving into optimizing individual blog posts and the like for SEO, but for now work on getting the small issues taken care of, and please leave any tips in the comments below.