In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series. In part two, I wrote about having one website address. In part three, I wrote about internal linking strategies. In part four, I emphasized meta descriptions and meta tags. In part five, I introduced keywords, keyword density and keyword placement ideas. It's time to move on to offsite SEO by starting with the format of a link, commonly called a backlink because it links back to another site and not internally.

Backlink Format

The best and most effective backlink is a link that targets a specific keyword on a specific page of a site. Any backlink is better than no backlink, but targeted backlinks drive traffic to specific pages instead of to the home page. Here's an example of a targeted backlink:

<a href="http://www.untwistedvortex.com/2008/08/13/nursing-school-philippines-necessary-equipment/" title="A Nursing School in the Philippines and Necessary Equipment" target="_blank">Philippine nursing school</a>

Used in context, it looks like this: Interested in a career in nursing? Take a minute to examine a Philippine nursing school as one option out of the many options available to you.

Let's break down the attributes one by one.

The Hyperlink Reference Attribute

The "a" stands for anchor and "href" stands for hyperlink reference. I'll bet you'll have a hard time finding the abbreviation for "href" defined anywhere else.

The actual link, as it appears in a browser, is what's assigned to the "href" attribute. One mistake I've seen a lot of is when people link to a comment instead of a page (with "#comment-19139" or something appended to the URL). If the comment gets deleted, the link dies. It's now called a "dangling" link. Dangling links have absolutely no value at all.

The Relationship Attribute

I left the "rel=" attribute out of the example because you don't need it to produce a backlink. If you want to comply with Google's rules, you'll want to add "rel=nofollow" to backlinks that are paid for. If you're looking for traffic from other search engines, you should know that they ignore this attribute — it's a Google thing only.

The Title Attribute

Some people are under the mistaken impression that the title attribute is treated like a keyword. Instead, it's treated as content by the search engines. It's a usability and accessibility attribute. The best description is that it shows you where you're going before you click a link.

Even though it has no keyword value, I recommend using it as it is intended. It makes your links a lot friendlier than they would otherwise be. How many times have you hesitated to click on a shortened URL (like TinyURL) because there wasn't anything telling you where you were going to end up?

The Target Attribute

This attribute is valid in all HTML markup except HTML Strict and I really don't know why the strict document type disallows it. One theory is that the user, not the browser, should determine how links behave. I say balderdash. The vast majority of users have no clue how to control the links they click on.

The target attribute for backlinks should always be target="_blank" where as internal links shouldn't specify any target attribute at all. Does anyone still use frames? Frames are the only things that the other target parameters deal with.

Finally! The Anchor Text

This is the meat of the link, the coup de grace, the defining blow. If you use an anchor text like "here", "click this" or something similar, you have killed the value of that backlink as far as targeted traffic is concerned. Keywords are competitive and those keywords are in the billions.

If you don't know what the anchor text should be, you can do one of two things. You can ask or you can guess. Asking will get the better result, obviously, but guessing should be pretty simple. Just look for the main topic and work from there.

Coming in Part Seven

I wrote from the viewpoint of providing backlinks to someone else, but the rules to applying backlinks to yourself still apply. In the next part of the series, I'm going to show you some places where you can create your own backlinks and point them anywhere on your site without it looking like search engine spam (and without pissing off other site owners).

If you don't want to miss anything, make sure you subscribe to my daily, full articles by email.

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• The UV SEO Series – Part Three – Internal Linking
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In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series and didn't get into anything specific. In part two, I wrote about having one website address. I'm continuing on track with the onsite SEO portion with part three, internal linking strategies. It's another article that's longer than I anticipated, so please take your time.

Why is internal linking important?

To understand, you have to think like a robot. A robot has no incentive to visit another page unless it's linked to the current page in some way. If there are no links pointing to another page, it may eventually get to the other page, but it will take longer and it may not happen until a subsequent visit. Without links, it has to rely on other factors such as site maps, archive pages and category pages. Why take chances?

From personal observation I can tell you that my entire blog is not re-indexed frequently. Only the new pages get indexed on every visit and old pages only get crawled if there's been some kind of change to them or if new internal links point to them.

Develop a keyword list.

When you write a new article, you need to link to any articles related to the current one and it's easy to do. You don't have to focus on keywords because the relevancy is self-explanatory.

If you're targeting keywords for your entire site, or for specific pages, internal linking will build up the keyword authority. Rather than try to explain it in long form, I'll give you examples from this blog. My main keyword is Philippines and some related keywords are Jollibee Philippines and Philippine Airlines. That's just a fraction of them and I want you to notice how I used the keywords as anchor text.

My internal linking strategy is to link to the pages for my chosen keywords at least 10 times; 10 times for the main keyword and 10 times for the related keywords. The more related articles I write, the easier it is to accomplish. This is called "link clustering".

Use the header, the sidebars, and the footer.

You can use the header and footer to link every page to your home page. You don't want to waste the link authority on a general term such as "home" and there's an easy way to avoid it. Have the home link point to another page that redirects back to the home page. On that page, use something like this:

<?php
header ("Location: http://www.untwistedvortex.com/");
exit;
?>

If you don't have PHP running, you can use a meta redirection to accomplish the same thing. Just make sure to specify a delay of 0 seconds. I don't have the code handy (I never use it) or I'd give you an example.

Notice how I use "Untwisted Vortex in the Philippines" in the footer. There's the main keyword that links directly to the home page from every page.

The sidebar is a great place to link to every related keyword. I have my "The Philippines" widget in the right sidebar (for now) and my keywords are in each of the titles so I don't have to manipulate the anchor text.

Work with every page, not just new pages.

People have a tendency to link back to old articles when they write new ones. You should go through your pages (and I have over 1300 here, rapidly approaching 1400) one by one to link to both relevant pages and pages with the targeted keywords. While you're doing that, you'll get the opportunity to reword specific phrases and such to optimize keyword usage.

It doesn't have to be done all at once. Working with 10 to 20 pages at a time, and only once per week, should be sufficient. If you get in the habit of doing it, it gets easier and easier.

Side Benefits

Link building is the most boring thing you can do with your website, but it's also the most necessary thing to do. It has side benefits that can't be ignored, however, even if those benefits aren't readily apparent.

While you're building your internal links, you'll see what you've been focusing on as opposed to what you should be focusing on as your main topics. If you find that you stray from your main topics too often, this will help you get back on track.

Internal link building will also help you generate ideas. Perhaps you meant to write about something and forgot about it. Perhaps you didn't spend enough effort on a particular topic. The pieces start to come together as you build your internal links.

Coming in Part Four

In part four, I'm going to emphasize meta descriptions and meta keywords. Google may be the biggest search engine in town, but it isn't the only varmint you should be gunning for.

If you don't want to miss anything, make sure you subscribe to my daily, full articles by email.

Similar Posts:

• The UV SEO Series – Part Five – Keywords
• The UV SEO Series – Part Six – Backlink Format
• The UV SEO Series – Part Four – Meta
• The UV SEO Series – Part Two – One Website Address
• The UV SEO Series – Part Seven – Backlink Sources

In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series and didn't get into anything specific. This is part two and the beginning of the onsite SEO portion of the series. It's longer than I anticipated so please, take your time.

One Website Address

How many ways can someone reach your website's home page? Do you, or do you not, use "www." in front of the domain name? Wouldn't it make sense to make sure the search engines, as well as people, can find your website at only one address?

What about your individual pages or posts? If you use pretty permalinks, do they all end with "/", just like the home page should? If your home page address starts with "www.", shouldn't the individual pages and posts start the same way?

The search engines are pretty good about indexing websites the way you intend, but why allow them to make mistakes? If you want a page to rank high in the SERPS, wouldn't it be easier if the page is being indexed with one address instead of two, three or four?

A few short months after I started this blog, I found my website listed by various search engines in four different ways:

• untwistedvortex.com
• untwistedvortex.com/
• www.untwistedvortex.com
• www.untwistedvortex.com/

I also found individual blog posts with either the trailing slash in place or not in place — two different URLs for each post. Would you believe that some addresses had higher rankings than the competing addresses? I believe one consistent format would have ranked better than all the different versions combined.

Most web servers automatically tack on the trailing slash, but not all of them. Most web servers also redirect to the appropriate page, with or without "www.", but then again, not all of them. I can't count how many broken links I've encountered due to server inconsistencies.

The simple solution is to make sure your website always points to the correct locations. The most popular website software packages either have this feature built in or the feature can be enabled with various plugins or add-ons. There are two other ways: The .htaccess file for web servers that support it or a simple PHP script.

The .htaccess code requires mod_rewrite to be turned on at the web server (it is on most). The code to force a redirection to the "www." or non-www version of the address looks like this:

Add www:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^untwistedvortex.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.untwistedvortex.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Remove www:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.untwistedvortex.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://untwistedvortex.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Here's the code to force a trailing slash. Insert it below the current "RewriteRule" above (use this only if your pages don't end with an extension):

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^\.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]

This is a PHP script that will do it if you don't have .htaccess to work with. Insert it at the top of the page before anything else and un-comment the appropriate lines (and delete unused commented lines):

<?php
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

// to redirect to non-www URL
// if (substr($host,0,4) == 'www.') $url = substr($host,4);

// to redirect to www URL
// if (substr($host,0,4) != 'www.') $url = 'www.' . $host;

// remove home page from URL and force trailing slash
// change 'index.php' below to whatever your home page actually is
// if (strstr($uri, '/index.php') && substr($host, -1) != '/') $url = $host . '/';

// force trailing slash on individual pages (if extensions aren't used)
// if (strstr($uri, '/') && substr($uri,-1) != '/') $url .= '/';

header ("Location: http://$url,TRUE,301");
exit;
?>

Coming in Part Three

Part three will cover internal linking strategies. It may not seem important, but I'll point out more than one reason to develop a consistent internal linking strategy.

If you don't want to miss anything, make sure you subscribe to my daily, full articles by email.

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There's a reason I chose to build up my legion of Noble UV Minions the way I decided to do it (See "How to Become a Noble UV Minion and Like it".). I don't like repeating myself. I don't want to send out a separate email message, even if it is to a mailing list, for something that I've already written. Especially when the original material is automatically sent out every day.

Speaking of mailing lists, don't you find it annoying when someone sends a mailing list message to go read something that you've already read? How about the constant requests to visit someone's site? All I can say to people like that is "give me a break". I have to say this: If I visited every site that people asked me to visit, read everything that people asked me to read, voted on every article a vote was requested for, and a did a whole slew of things I was asked to do, I wouldn't have time to do anything else. That includes sleep.

Enough with the whining! It's time for a few more links for my…

Noble UV Minions

• The ultimate geek girl takes a look at blindly Digging and Stumbling articles by your friends and e-friends. Go on over and let her know if you Digg and Stumble on Request. What? You say you can't because comments are already closed? Send her a message on her contact page. I guarantee you, she'll respond. (Note: Comments are now open.)
• Live Asia, see China, and enjoy travel, vicariously through Steve at "Asian Ramblings". I already live in Asia, but I like to see China through his eyes.
• A frequent commenter, Steve is the purveyor of paisley-free, Latvian-sensitive, noble minion US-made trade show display booths. If you ever need one, Steve will hook you up.
• Carrie Marshall is the author of "My Several Worlds". She's a world traveler and adventurer, ESL teacher, photographer, freelance writer, artist, and a musician. A Jill (not a Jack) of all trades.

You're NOT a Noble UV Minion?

You don't have to be a Noble UV Minion in order to keep up with the awesomeness of the things I write about. Just come back and visit every so often, or better yet, subscribe to my daily, full articles by email.

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Before I begin, I'll tell you up front that I'm not a search engine optimization (SEO) expert of any kind. I've tested everything I'll be telling you to do and I've spent more than six months experimenting to find out what works and what doesn't. My blog now ranks on the first page of Google's and Yahoo's search engine result pages (SERPS), and is starting to rank well on the others, for hundreds of keywords, some with extremely short tails and even a few single-word keywords. Don't worry, I'll explain what all of it means as we go along.

Introduction to the Untwisted Vortex (UV) SEO Series

In this series of articles, I'm going to give away information that I could probably make money with if I sold it as an e-book or something. Since I'm not an expert and because the SEO landscape changes from time to time, I'd feel pretty bad if I made a costly mistake on your behalf.

I'll be going through the step-by-step methods of SEO that any website can use, not just blogs. Nevertheless, I'll be leaning toward blogs because the search engines like them a lot more than static websites. I'll start with onsite SEO and finish with offsite SEO, hoping not to get sidetracked along the way.

Onsite SEO vs. Offsite SEO

You've probably seen these phrases tossed around without really understanding what they mean. Onsite SEO refers to the things that you can do with your site to make it as attractive to search engines as possible. Offsite SEO refers to the things that you can do to increase the link authority of your site, from outside your site, which will make it even more attractive to search engines.

Offsite SEO enhances onsite SEO, if you're actually practicing onsite SEO, but can't replace it. Offsite SEO is practically worthless if you don't practice onsite SEO. Once you start practicing onsite SEO, it starts to become a second nature to you.

If you practice onsite SEO, low competition keywords require little or no offsite SEO in order to rank high in the SERPS. High competition keywords require a lot more offsite SEO. Doing it the right way as opposed to the fast way, will cause your keywords to rank high in the SERPS and stay there.

Social Website Traffic vs. Search Engine Website Traffic

Before I move onto part two of the series, I want to make it abundantly clear that if your sole goal is to have a socially popular site, then you're wasting your time if you spend time practicing SEO. Your time will be much better spent by interacting at the various and numerous social networks.

My own personal experience has proven that you don't have to be involved with social networking to be socially popular. If you practice SEO for your site, while providing valuable content, contacts originating from the SERPS will provide you with more socialization than you can keep up with.

Coming in Part Two

I'll begin with some basic techniques of onsite SEO in part two of the series. I should be able to cover everything you need to know about your website addresses, things you may not have even thought about.

If you don't want to miss anything, make sure you subscribe to my daily, full articles by email.

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• The UV SEO Series – Part Five – Keywords
• The UV SEO Series – Part Four – Meta
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• The UV SEO Series – Part Three – Internal Linking

I was invited to try out Ask2link a few days ago. It's a new banner and text link ad service.

After and I signed up and discovered the text link ads were not "nofollow", I exchanged email messages with one of the representatives. When I told her that I couldn't use the text link ads portion of the service in its current form, she politely informed me that a solution was currently being worked on and that I would receive a message as soon as it was implemented.

[Update 2008-08-04: The choice is now available when editing the ad slot.]

In the meantime…

For those of you with a new website, which isn't ranking in the search engines yet, this shouldn't be a problem until it does. Also, if your site is purely social and search engine traffic doesn't mean anything to you, then this is a great way to sell the unused space and make enough to cover your hosting and then some.

You get paid through PayPal, with the minimum payout being $10.00 (in US dollars). The referral program is pretty good too.

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I'm surprised that more people haven't taken me up on my offer. (The original offer still stands and will continue to stand. See "How to Become a Noble UV Minion and Like it".). I have more blog review requests coming out of my yin-yang than I can handle, but this is a far easier way to get backlinks. I just don't understand.

Although the original article was written in a "tongue-in-cheek" kind of way, I was totally serious about providing free links. Oh well, if you don't take me up on my offer, it's your loss.

The list is short this time and I would like to keep it as close to 10 as possible when publishing it. Anyway, here are a couple of links for my…

Noble UV Minions

• Visit Tim & Ernie down at the Redneck Bar & Grill. Don't forget to try some of their world famous Papaya Habanero Hot Sauce. Your mouth will thank you.
• People who think they may be suffering from depression should ask themselves "Does Prozak work?" before taking the medication. A simple exercise routine may be a better alternative.

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As a website owner, you should be worried when someone scrapes all or part of the content of one of your pages. If you're not familiar with it, the Copyscape service is one way to find them and start the elimination process. There is a procedure, which you can do for free (Copyscape charges for more than 10 searches per month) over and over again, that will never cost you anything.

Link to Yourself

Pick a word, any word, on your page and create a link back to that page. As I mentioned in "A Quick Lesson in Website Surreptitiousness", you simply remove any decoration for that link. Don't use the title attribute, though, because you don't want a scraper spotting it when he or she hovers over it. It's not completely hidden; the word is still there and anyone who uses a browser to override or disable CSS can see the link. Not only that, but the link will still appear in the status bar of most browsers.

In the article by Matt Cutts, "Hidden links", he states "Now there’s nothing bad about changing the style of a link to some degree, but let me show you an example of going overboard…" and the example he gave "…crosses over into deceptiveness and violates our quality guidelines…"

It's clear to me that my suggestion doesn't violate the quality guidelines, especially since I'm telling you to link back to your own specific page. The robots that index websites won't follow the link, obviously, since it doesn't go anywhere.

Use Special Words

You don't want to use common words in this way. If you use something like "and", you'll be kicking yourself later. You can even make up a word. Do a Google search for your made up word and see if there are any results and keep trying if there are. Don't use "niebu", okay? (Go ahead and hover over "niebu".)

Setup a link to your special word or words EVERY TIME you publish a page or post. The closer to the start of the content, the better. If you have trouble using nonsensical words, try using a misspelled word on purpose (wrong spelling, transposed characters, etc.). Just make sure the word doesn't yield any search results before you use it. You could even say something like "here at Untwisted Vortex's fern grotto" (with your site, of course) and make the phrase into a link.

Use Google Alerts

You can set up to 1,000 Google Alerts to be sent to your email address. Specify your special word or phrase and use the "comprehensive" and "as-it-happens" options. Those are the options I use and I don't get overwhelmed with email yet. You can always change the frequency when managing your alerts.

You have to have a Google account in order to use Google Alerts. If you don't have an account, create one. You'll be glad you did. You'll need it later for access to the Google Webmaster Tools.

Destroy the Value of Duplicate Content

Once you receive a Google Alert showing you that someone has scraped your page, you need to examine the scrape.

Is it more than 150 characters? No? Leave it alone. Sometimes people link to your page with long links. Thankfully, most link anchors are only a few words, like when Sephy wrote "Where did WordPress go wrong?" and linked to one of my articles with just two words.

Is it the size of a paragraph or two, but well under half of your page? If so, does it include a link back to your page at the beginning or the end? If it includes a link, leave it alone. Good scrapers, like feed aggregators, do this all the time.

Is it a full page? Regardless if it's linked back to you or not, you can now report it as spam in Google's index from the Webmaster Tools dashboard. But should you?

What you should be worried about is getting penalized for duplicating content from somewhere else when that somewhere else is duplicating YOUR content. There are three ways to defeat the bad scrapers:

1. Report it to Google. Make sure you have the information they need or Google won't do anything. If you do, they'll de-index that page or de-index the entire site. I've been very successful with this method.
2. Rewrite your original page. This can be easy or hard depending on what you wrote about. Frank of OpTempo wrote about duplicate content filtering concepts back in May and explained how it can be made to work for you.
3. Try to get the website that scraped the content to remove it. Again, this can be easy or hard. It all depends on who's doing the scraping. If it's a mistake by a newbie blogger, it's easy. If it's a professional scraper, then good luck.

Final Thoughts

If you use my suggestion and you get scraped by a bad scraper, you'll get a free one-way backlink in the process. If you're optimizing your content for search engines and using keywords properly, it's going to happen a lot. Don't let it bother you until it gets beyond 300 characters or so — that's a lot of text.

If you have a complete page scraped, I wouldn't bother with it unless and until you find the other party's page ranking higher in Google or Yahoo. Just keep notes and check up on it periodically. I've seen pages both de-indexed and removed without any effort on my part at all.

The reason I put undecorated links in more than one article is to show you that I'm not afraid of being penalized for it. I'm not hiding them from anyone but the scrapers and people who tend to be click-happy. I would never link to a bad site, hide a paid link, or anything like that. That's asking for trouble and I would never recommend it to anyone.

Now that I've said my 1,000+ word spiel about bad scrapers inspired by Grizzly's article, "Duplicate Content is Google's Weak Link", tell me what you do with them and how you do it. I'm all ears (or eyes).

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I'm going to answer the question that "Barack Obama" (not the real one, of course) left as a comment on my article about Backlink Building with DoFollow Blogs and the CommentLuv WordPress Plugin, "So how does allowing dofollow backlinks help your blog?", by referencing other articles and comments.

The Value of Comments in Search Engines

As you can see from the subheader, which I made into a link to an existing article, I've already written about the value of comments. Since the time I wrote the first article I mentioned, Stephen Cronin of More Than Scratch the Surface created the KeywordLuv plugin to give you another option for your comment header — a plugin I use on this blog.

The Key is in the Keywords

In the comments of that second article, Hari of Hari's Corner stated:

I've found that I get very few legit comments on old posts on my own blog, but nevertheless a lot of irrelevant search results have ended up on my blog thanks to comments or certain combinations of keywords found therein.

Also sometimes comments tend to become a separate thread of discussion so might not always improve the keyword richness of the article in question.

Not that I'm complaining though. :grin:

Later, Lin of Telling It Like It Is said:

I learned awhile back about the benefits brought from comments that include a variety of keywords. I first noticed it when I noticed the description text and I knew it wasn't part of my post, and then it dawned on me, Oh Yeah! so-and-so left a comment with those words. I think it's fabulous that comments can help in that way. 'Course, truth be told…, I tend to help it in the comments too ever since I discovered how that works. :grin:

Do I need to say anything more?

(Image source: BioRUST)

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This actually a follow-up to my "lesson on surreptitiousness" and a more formal response to a comment by Hari of Hari's Corner. Hari said "…any content that is hidden from readers but available to search engine crawlers is considered "cloaking" by google according to their ToS and would be considered spamming their search engine."

What Google's ToS Actually Says

I extracted the relevant text. My article didn't say to do any of these things:

Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Including text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text
• Setting the font size to 0

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

• The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
• CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
• The link is hidden in a small character – for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.

There's more information at the Webmaster Help Center, under "Hidden text and links" in case you want to read the whole thing for yourself.

It's About Accessibility and Perception

I'm not advocating hiding text and links the way Google describes. Making links look like ordinary text still makes the links accessible by plain text browsers, screen readers and anyone who turns CSS off in their browser. Doing it any other way is considered cloaking and used for things like keyword stuffing or presenting different text to the search engines than what's presented to the readers.

Perception is a pretty strong reason, however, to avoid hiding any links at all. What you and I may perceive as something legitimate may not be perceived by others in quite the same light. For that very reason, I advise extreme caution even when doing it the legitimate way. If you're planning to do it for a specific purpose, try to make it temporary.

I have some links that look like plain text in place and they're only there like that until the search engines completely index my new niche blogs. Once the indexing has taken place and the posts appear in search results, I plan to change them back into regular links or remove the links altogether.

Another good reason, as Steve of Pinnacle Trade Show Displays pointed out, to do links like this in the first place is to prevent competitors from seeing your anchor text. Once the anchor text has done its job, however, it would be advisable to turn the links back into regular links. Never give the competition any edge, even if that edge is reporting spam using undecorated links as an excuse.

Conclusion

When in doubt, don't do it. I've done it and others have done it, but you need to make sure you use your own judgment as to what's right and what's wrong.

Do you really think you'd get penalized for not decorating your links with different colors or underlines? Are links always meant to be clicked? I submit that links are used for indexing way more than clicking, even though they were never originally intended to be used that way.

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• Defeating Bad Scrapers the Free and Easy Way
• A Quick Lesson in Website Surreptitiousness
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