Thrive Learning Institute - SEO Tips

The Value of Linking

Thrive Learning Institute teaches that essentially, all of marketing on the internet comes down to one thing: Inbound Links. These are links that people can click on to come to your website from some other place, like another site, a directory, an article, a search engine, or even an email. There are three ways that links are important:

Direct clicking - If a visitor to another website sees that there's a link to your site, there's an opportunity for them to click through to you. It then stands to reason that the more links you have out on the net pointing to you, the more traffic they'll send. An addition benefit is that this traffic gets directly to your site, bypassing the search engines completely.

Search engine ranking - Search engines, especially Google, check to see how many other sites and other pages are linking to yours. They equate this with importance and popularity, and if you have a lot of links, you'll get ranked higher. Getting lots of quality links is called "Off-site SEO".

Search engine indexing - Search engines have programs (called, "spiders", "crawlers", and "robots") that regularly scour the internet, looking for more sites to add to their listings, and looking to update the listings of the sites they already have. The more and better links you have coming to your site, the faster you'll get added to the search engines, and the more often your site will be updated in their listings.

Stay tuned for more SEO tips from Thrive Learning Institute.

Link Baiting - Thrive Learning Institute

When it comes to SEO there are several factors than contribute in a major way to the webpage's strength in the search engines. Aside from on page optimization and probably more essential is the obtaining of backlinks. In this article from Thrive Learning Institute we'll discuss what backlinks are and the different strategies you can you use them to drive traffic and profits.

What are backlinks?

Back links are links from outside sources that link directly to your website or a page within your website. The more links you have from these outside sources the higher Google will rank you, the more traffic you'll and, if you're going for money, the more $ you'll make.

Because backlinks are an essential source of income for the online community, it's plain to see why so much has been written about it and why there is so much confusion about it. I'll attempt to shed some light on one section of the art and psychology of getting quality backlinks to your site.

Link Baiting

A popular way to build high quality backlinks to your website is to use a method called "Link baiting". Now we all write content for our websites and we try and make it good, useful content that people will find useful. Many times however we write a piece just for the sake of getting some text for on page SEO where you can stick your keywords for the crawler (programs that scan your site for keywords and content relevance). Link Baiting is the process of writing a piece of content with the intent of making it go viral so it spread across the net.

There are a few different kinds of content that are more apt to catch the imagination of net dwellers than others however.

Humor
Contrary
Resource
News

Writing a humorous article and combining it with a funny picture or video is a great way to stir things up in your niche. Everyone has received those emails filled with ridiculous pictures before and it gets passed through friend networks forever. That is what you're going for with a humorous piece sans email. You want this to take hold on the social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and propeller and you want other bloggers in your niche to link to it and comment on it. So lighten things up a bit and let it fly!

Writing a post that is contrary to popular belief or principle is another awesome way to stir things up in the community. Nothing incites more buzz than a respected blogger saying something seemingly insane but then backing it up with data and evidence. This is probably one of the hardest things to do and because of that its also one of the most effective.

Take for example, Tim Ferriss. He wrote a great book, called The Four Hour Work Week, that basically attacks the corporate employee and the corporate lifestyle. Ridiculing it as a 40 year prison and then proceeded to show the way out. This book has been in bold rebellion of the societal norm and because of that reason he has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for 2 years straight. I know this is an extreme example but it illustrated my point well. Be intelligently controversial and you could have your ticket to fame and see a dramatic increase in your income.

Creating a useful resource is an effective and easy way to get lots of backlinks. Look around your niche and find a need that hasn't been filled effectively and then put together a comprehensive resource that will be a great benefit to others in your niche. If its useful you'll see tons of new backlinks to your site as people discover your post or article.

The last method I've listed is that of writing news posts. The trick to this one is to be first. It doesn't necessarily have to be a perfect post but if you can get a thorough article out there about breaking news along with some analysis of your own it can spread like wildfire and build a LOT of valuable backlinks.

At Thrive Learning Institute we urge you to start implementing some of these strategies in the articles you write or posts for your blog and test them out. You'll find that you're better at some than others. The more you test the more successful you'll be so get to it and start building backlinks!

Simple SEO Tips - Thrive Learning Institute

Here are a few tips and simple rules from Thrive Learning Institute you should follow to improve easily your rankings in the different search engines. Nothing new and nothing very complex but good tips that work straight from the knowledge base of Thrive Learning Institute.

So, I hope you enjoy reading this little "SEO Beginner Guide" and I hope it helps you grow your traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a set of techniques and strategies to optimize websites for the search engines and get better rankings on the search results of those engines.

There are a few more abbreviations and terms you should now if you start learning SEO, among others:

SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages.

Anchor text: Text used as a link.

Backlink: Any link pointing to your web site. Also called Inbound link.

One-way link: When a site or page has a link to your site, and your doesn't have any link back to it.

Keywords density: Relation of a keyword to the other words in a web page element. For example, the web page title <>This is just an example for a web page title< / title > has a keyword density of 20% because 7 out of 35 characters in this title make the word "example".

Outbound link: Any link on your page pointing to another site.

So, let's start working on it right away!

Tip 1 - Anchor text
When you create a link to another page or another site of yours, don't just use "click here" or "go" as the anchor text. Basically, don't do this:

To join our online HTML training, < href="001.html">click here< /a>.

Instead, use the keywords related to that page:

Join now our < href="online-html-training.html">online HTML training.

Try also to use these keywords in the name of the HTML file.
Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself. (anchor text)
"click here" is meaningless. But "online HTML training" correspond exactly to your subject, and this specific page, even independantly of its content, will be considered as an interresting page for "online HTML training" by the search engines.

Tip 2 - Backlinks
Spend time to contact other webmasters who have a site about the same subject as yours and exchange text links.
Again, use the keywords that you target in the anchor text of those links. Don't always use the same keywords but sometimes, use synonims and variations.
Only consider a link exchange with sites treating the same subject. Try to get at least 40 backlinks on 40 different websites.

Tip 3 - Pages title
Give a different title to each page, use keywords related to the page.

Tip 4 - Content
Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know. Eventually, don't correct your typos or mistakes, people will do the same typos when they do a research!

Plus:
Always set the value of the alt="" tag of your images.

< src="html-training.jpg" alt="HTML Training">

Set the description and keywords metas. If possible, write different metas for each page.

< name="description" content="...">
< name="keywords" content="...">


Tip 5 - Content Actualization
You have nice content? Plenty of backlinks and optimized pages? Great, but don't start sleeping on it.
Update your content as often as possible. Add pages, articles, news... Grow your site.

Tip 6 - Web Hosting
Make sure your site loads fast and your hosting is good. A slow web site is no good.

Tip 7 - Clean HTML code
Try to have your HTML code as clean as possible. And try to reduce it a maximum. You should have a lot of text content and a bit of HTML code, not the contrary.

Tip 8 - Directories
Do not forget to post your web site to all the Internet directories related to your subject. These links are better than links exchanges as usually, directories do not require a link back to their site. These one-way links have a very good value for search engines.
Also submit it to DMOZ directory. It will probably take a few months to get your sited indexed, but the backlinks you will get there are worth gold.

Tip 9 - HTML tags H1, H2, B, U...
Use the headers tags for your titles and subtitles, search engine will give more importance to those texts.

<>HTML Training< /h1>

The look of these tags is not so nice but you can use CSS to redefine it.

h1 { color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px }


Tip 10 - Domain name
The keywords used in the domain name have great importance for some search engines, such as Google. If possible, register a domain name with your target keywords.

A domain name like http://www.buy-flowers.com has good chances to get ranked well on "buy flowers" with a bit of SEO and appropriate content.

You can also try subdomains for your most important sections. Subdomains will usually get indexed much faster than the sub-pages and directories.
Taking our example, you could create http://roses.buy-flowers.com, http://tulips.buy-flowers.com, ... generating a kind of "mini-site" for each.

Tip 11 - Inbound/Outbound links
Make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links on your pages. If you have too much outbound links, search engines will devaluate the importance of your page, considering it's just making a gateway to other sites, without having a good value for the surfer.

Tip 12 - Experiment!
Try new things. Play with the keywords density, your site structure, HTML tags and elements.
Some techniques work good with Google, not for Yahoo or MSN and vice-versa. And moreover, the search engine algorithms are changing all the time! Some old strategy might not work anymore but suddenly work great for one of them.

Well, that's it for today! I think that covers most of the SEO Basics you need to know to start optimizing your site. Thrive Learning Institute thanks you for for reading!

Tip of the Week: Building a Link System

In the beginning, you will probably want to link to more popular websites from your own website but as your link building progresses other steps must be taken to ensure the best results. Eventually, you're going to want to contact companies who will benefit from your products to have them place a link to your website on their own website. Be careful how you approach the company, you want to help them realize what's in it for them not what's in it for you. Send them a personalized letter identifying core ways that adding your link to their website will increase their sales.

Internal links are another good way to build up your link system; these are easier and faster than external links. You may be thinking "I already have an internal link system set up through my navigation" but that's not enough. You need to create links from one portion of your website to another in order to get better results. Commonly, these links are found in articles, blogs, or at the bottom of the page.

You will not have immediate effects from working on a link system to your website. It takes weeks, maybe even months before you will see your website climbing in the search engine ranks.

Recommended Article: Make Money With Internet Marketing

Go Away No Follow Links!

As we all know link building is still one of the most valuable ways to increase your rankings on the search engines. Throughout the past few years link building has continued to be an effective form of search engine optimization as well as internet marketing. Now even though link building has continued to be an effective form of optimizing your site the methods have changed through the first few years.
A few years ago link trading was all the rage so people creating link trading programs, webrings etc.. which search engines considered abuse and now those aren't as effective. The next thing that started to work was getting listed in directories and then everyone and their dog started creating free directories so that method doesn't work as well anymore. The main pattern to see here is the fact that methods for link building have changed in recent years but the principle has remained consistent and has always worked.
With the advent of the "nofollow" link link building techniques are dropping like flies because more and more links are getting nailed with the "nofollow" tag. Now the no follow tag itself made sense orgingally it was a way to get rid of blog comment spamming but since then it has started to get abused in my opinion, now Wikipedia links, Youtube links, most forum links are all getting tagged with the nofollow link which makes one start to think, "What link building techniques are left?"

When it comes to link building Thrive Learning Institute has the answers, for tips on the future of link building contact us at our site www.thriveli.com.

Local Market Linking

Remember that the secret to making link-trading work, is to trade links with other websites that share your target market. So as a dentist in Dubuque Iowa, who should you trade links with? Other dentist websites all over the Web? No. You should trade with any and every local website, regardless of what the content of the website is, as long as it is of interest to local residents. Trade with local carpet cleaning websites, trade with local accountant websites, and especially trade with local candy store websites! These websites don't have anything to do with dentistry. But they share your target market of local people, most of whom probably have teeth.

Link Trading Slang

Throughout the next few posts we will cover several different link building techniques. Link building is still one of the best ways to get your site ranking higher in the search results. We will kick it off by listing some of the Slang terms associated with Link Trading:

• Surf-n-Swap- This is a term that summarizes the overall process of basic link trading, in that you surf the net looking for partners, and swap links with them by sending an email request.

• Link Poaching- A strategy for finding link trade partners. Link Poaching involves using a variety of techniques (listed below) for finding which websites are trading with your competitors and requesting link trades with them. The theory here is that since they are already trading links with your competitor they are probably very likely to be willing to trade with you too.

• Dead Link- A term for a link that points to nowhere. Occasionally when you trade links, a particular site with whom you have traded a link will cease to exist for a variety of reasons, but the link on your website is still there. Clicking on it now generates an error. You should check for dead links periodically-maybe once or twice a year.