Of course I was wrong, because a link wheel is only a tool or a start.  Its like your core.  You need to link to your link wheel.  In the game of SEO its about looking natural.  If all of your links are pointing to your main site, Google will know that its not natural.  However if you had a site that went viral and everyone linked to it cause it spread by word of mouth, then you would have links showing up all over web 2.0 properties.

People hang out and create pages on places like squidoo, and Google likes links that they feel are from people “casting their vote” for a site.  So if you had a viral site you would naturally have links on web 2.0 properties, forums, blogs, etc…  People would also naturally link to other web 2.0 sites and not always link to your site. You have to understand that 90 something percent of people can’t tell the difference between paid ads on Google search results and organic.  So if they can’t even tell the difference in an ad and not, then they don’t really know that they should link to your site even if it was viral.  They would often link to the site that led them to your site instead of your actual site.   Basically the average person just doesn’t get a lot of in depth internet/seo stuff.  Thus we need to emulate this randomness of people.

So we make a link wheel and we create links to the link wheel.  Links from other web 2.0 sites, links from forum sigs, links from blog comments, links from article submission, directory submission, etc….  If you are planning on doing any greayhat/blackhat stuff, then linking that stuff to the link wheel rather then directly can protect your site from harm if google penalizes for the links, but you get the link equity if its not penalized.  Its a win win.  Also if you happen to be able to get a link from a “bad neighborhood” or totally no relevant site you can still pass the juice to your site ultimately, but by filtering it thru your link wheel.  I heard someone describe it as “link laundering”  lol.  Not that I am saying you should go spam your link everywhere, but I have had opportunity on occasion to get a link free that wasn’t really relevant.  Trade and different things.

Point really is just to try and emulate the total randomness of people that have no idea what they are doing when it comes to the web, or people that know just enough to be dangerous.  If you need some good examples sit down with a friend that knows enough to be dangerous, but no more and ask them to help you work on some project.  Research, creating a squidoo page, maybe a website they are intersted in, etc…. Just watch how they surf, what engines they use, what they click, what they think, how they act, how they react to things… I have had the opportunity just from circumstances of my day job to do this a lot.  Its VERY VERY enlightening.  Then just emulate them.  People are random, but thats normal to them.  You could also read about peoples world view.  I have read some good stuff, but the most recent is Seth Godins All Marketers are Liars – Now renamed All Marketers Tell Stories.  Its on itunes and Amazon.

Link to your link wheels. If it seems like a logical link structre, don’t do it.  If it seems like a random un logical link structure, thats the ticket, run with it. Not to say you don’t need a plan, but generally be creative.

Why should I link to my link wheel? : MAttBorden.com.

For example, if there is a high traffic keyword, and/or a very expense keyword, why not optimize one of your webpages for that term? That way, you’ll end up saving a lot of money from Paid Search because of your SEO.

Rather than going after the “head terms” first, you might want to give this a try on your Long Tail Keywords. Once your chosen webpage has been optimized for that expensive keyword, sit back, relax (not too long), and watch all that “free” traffic from that once-upon-a-time expensive keyword.

Using PPC data for SEO

Originally from Shimon Sandler by Shimon Sandler

SEOMoz Page Strength Tool : Replacing Google PageRank?

SEOMoz has put together a new tool which Rand & Co. feel can “replace the often inaccurate and infrequently updated Google PageRank score in the toolbar.” SEOMoz has consolidated various metrics used to judge site value, visibility and SEO strength into one easy to use tool which hopefully will have a Firefox extension in the near future.

In an effort to make a better site and search engine importance measurement tool, SEOMoz Page Strength is pulling in linking info from Yahoo, pages indexed in Google, domain age, links from .edu and government sites, Alexa Traffic Rank (which does not seem to be working), Google PageRank, DMOZ and Wikipedia listings, and domain visibility.

I’ve found the rankings of my own sites to be accurate, especially those which have not achieved Google PageRank to date because of their newness and recommend giving SEOMoz Page Strength a spin.

More from SEOMoz:

“SEOmoz’s Page Strength tool is intended to serve as an alternative to Google’s PageRank score in the toolbar, offering insight into how valuable, important and popular a site or page is as compared to others on the web. If a particular page is on a very popular domain, it may be considered more important than if it’s on a domain that doesn’t receive much attention and, likewise, the homepage (or root URL) of a domain will often be considerably more popular/important than an internal page buried deep in the site’s architecture. In many cases, data may not be entirely accurate, as the search engines and other sources that provide information fluctuate.

Data about a URL in the tool is cached for 72 hours (3 days), so requesting the same information about a website in that period will not retrieve updated information. This tool is not designed to provide professional reporting or be used as an authoritative source of research about a site or page. When SEO/M professionals analyze a site, they are likely to use dozens or hundreds of additional pieces of data.”

SEOMoz Page Strength Tool : Replacing Google PageRank?

Originally from Search Engine Journal by Loren Baker, Editor

Yahoo Search Index and Google PageRank Updates

The past 24 hours have been quite busy as far as search engine updates are concerned, with Google updating PageRank and Yahoo making some changes to its search engine index.

Yesterday evening webmasters began picking up some changes in Google PageRank with the little green bar on their Google Toolbars (for those who don’t use all of those nifty datacenter PageRank checking tools on the market).

Looks like, according to some of the threads, PageRank is up for some and down for others.

Back to Yahoo, Rajat Mukherjee has made the first weather report of the summer on the Yahoo Search Blog with the news that Yahoo rolled out an index update last night and is looking for feedback:

As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

Remember, we recently beefed up our online help and resources, and the best way to provide us with feedback is via the online form.

 

So, how did the changes at Google & Yahoo effect your site?

Yahoo Search Index & Google PageRank Updates

Originally from Search Engine Journal by Loren Baker, Editor

How 46% of SEO’s get away with not buying text links.

Originally from Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog by Jim

I get this question often and see it mentioned in the forums as well.

There are many factors that influence whether your blog should be part of your site or it’s own domain name including:

Branding

Hosting platform

Blog application (software or hosted)

Resources for promotion

Resources for content production

Purpose of the blog

Timeframe for expected results

Target audience

For the most part, I recommend that a blog should be a subdirectory of the main company web site. The reason for this includes branding as well as the SEO benefit of having the blog and RSS feed use the main company URL. Having a blog and feed on a web site is one of the most productive things you can do to satisfy search engines’ appetite for fresh, themed content that attracts links.

If your situation allows for less emphasis on company brand and more significant resources and a longer timeline, then a dedicated domain name for your blog makes sense.

When branding is still important, but you want the blog perceived as a separate site, then a subdomain works well: blog.company.com. Search engines will see this url as differently as companyblog.com but you will have the branding benefit of using the same domain name.

The software you use for your blog makes a difference. Our favorite blog software for installation on a server are WordPress and Moveable Type. For hosted blogs like Typepad, there are domain name mapping options that allow you to point your Typepad url (www.typepad.com/myblog/) to a dedicated domain name (www.myblog.com) or subdomain (blog.company.com). That way you can use the adminstration tools hosted at Typepad, but the public side of the blog uses a domain name that you control.

Blogger offers the option of hosting the blog under a blogspot.com URL or it will FTP the blog files to any hosting account that you designate so you can use any of the domain options listed above. Blogger is very easy to use, but lacks functionality found in other applications.

Other hosted blog services allow you to have a subdomain URL such as: search-marketing.blogfuse.com, imarketing.vox.com or mimasm.wordpress.com. The thing to be careful with regarding hosted blog services is that you do not have 100% control over the domain name. If the service goes down, so do all of the blogs. If they decide to charge fees or higher fees, you have few options. The biggest issue is if you decide to move your blog to a dedicated domain name. Most hosted services do not offer any kind of 301 redirect option. Any search engine visibility or RSS feed subscribers will be interrupted until your new URL is found.

I think the best application for hosted blog services is for personal blogs more than for business. However, there are blog software and hosting programs set up specifically for business blogging such as blogs for specific vertical markets like those offered by my PR firm’s client, Blogging Systems.

Blog Address: Directory or Domain?

Originally from Blog Talk – WebProNews

Let’s talk about links today. To be more specific, let’s discuss the often overlooked links to your blog or website’s internal pages, located in the blog archives. When most bloggers and website owners think of links, they naturally consider links to their home page first. After all, the blog or website home page is the most obvious and visible page to be on the receiving end of an inbound link. Too often, the very important links to internal pages are forgotten, and get lost in the shuffle. Their latent SEO power is let go to waste. A bit of link planning can turn that lost SEO strength into higher search engine rankings.

Blogs in particular receive an abundance of incoming links to internal blog pages. Think of every time that someone linked directly to one of your blog posts. As that page moves into the blog archives, that internal inbound link remains alive, and providing link popularity to power to that page in particular; as well as the entire blog in general. Incoming link power is spread through the entire blog, as the pages are interlinked, helping all of the pages rank well, to some degree.

It’s thought that the search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search place varying, but high degrees of importance on internal site links. It seems logical that search engines would credit internal posts and articles, as links to internal pages are a strong indicator of valuable and important site or blog content. As a result, they help boost the blog or site’s search engine rankings. Both the linked page and the overall site or blog benefit.

Not only is the link important, but so is what is referred to as link anchor text. While the jargon term is interesting, link anchor text is simply the wording that appears on the clickable link line. Those words that are set to be clicked will often contain keywords relevant to the content of the receiving page.

Bloggers often use very powerful link anchor text, often without concern for the resulting SEO benefits, to describe the receiving post. Bloggers are usually more concerned with sharing information and interesting blog posts, and less with search engine rrankings. With that keyword rich link anchor text in place, the inbound link packs much more search engine punch.

When linking to your own archived blog posts, be sure to use descriptive wording, relevant to the post receiving the link. Words like “read more” or “click here” should be studiously avoided, and not be used as link anchor text. Of course, you may want to rank for those phrases for reasons unknown and entirely bewildering. In that case, use “click here” if you so desire.

Links from other blogs or traditional websites, to your internal site pages, can work wonders in your search engine placements. With the addition of keyword rich link anchor text, that linked page can turn your blog or site into an SEO dream.

Isn’t that resulting top spot in Google something to get excited about!

Internal Blog Links: SEO Help From Your Blog’s Past

Originally from Blog Talk – WebProNews

Google are not stupid, they have a lot of money and a lot of talented people working for them, they know about people buying links purely for link popularity and they are trying to do something about it.

Sites which have been built purely for selling text links on are easy to spot for us and for Google. Such sites are filitered and link reputation / PR is not passed on the way it would normally be from a “normal” site. The key is to do some background checking on the site you are thinking about buying some text links from. Is the site loaded with text link ads? Are the text links displayed on the site linking to irrelevant sites? Use your common sense and look for fresh sites with not too much text link advertising.

Matt Cutts has mentioned time and time again the importance of obtaining quality, relevant inbound links from related sites, getting these links is a serious factor in achieveing any sort of good rank.

Now you know that these text links still work and can perform some magic for your site go get some but don’t go overboard, implementing a link strategy needs to be a controlled process. Obtaining 25 links to your new site in the first month will do you more harm than good. Your site will be filtered as the Googlebot will detect un-natural link growth, especially if your link buying spree ends suddenly. The key is to develop a link addition frequency that looks natural.

Buying text links

Originally from Iain Davidson, search engine optimisation and tech blog by iain

SEO for Firefox : SEO Extension from SEObook

Originally from Search Engine Journal by Loren Baker, Editor

“The SEO Wizard will guide members in structuring their press releases in a way that will give them optimal results within news and search engines. The idea of search engine optimization, or increasing a company’s value in search engines by using specific keywords, has gained popularity in recent years. PRWeb’s SEO Wizard quantifies keyword traffic, so users can focus on the keywords that are popular search terms and valuable to their PR and marketing campaigns.”

This is a tool that PRWeb staff have been using and now is being made available to all PRWeb users. Here are a few screen shots:

First, the tool analyzes the content of the press release and offers a list of keyword phrases based on keyword density and placement in the release headline, summary and anchor text. Selecting any phrase automatically presents a dropdown list of related phrases. You can pick up to 5 phrases to analyze.

Once phrases are selected, you can choose to view similar phrases to the words selected or the most popular related phrases.

The resulting page shows a list of suggested phrases with Daily Queries, Monthly Queries, Correlation (Perfect, High, Medium, Low) as well as the number of occurances of the phrase in the release title, summary and body. At the end of the page is a list of phrases that are not included in the press release to consider adding.

This tool is a useful guide for suggesting keyword phrases specific to the characteristics of a press release. It will not automatically optimize a release for you – and shouldn’t. It does however offer a very convenient set of options for optimizing press releases all within the PRWeb interface.

PRWeb is easily the most progressive wire service available and I am amazed at how many innovations they’ve made in just the past month.

PRWeb Launches SEO Wizard

Originally from Online Marketing Blog by Lee Odden