Previously I wrote at some length about using forums to promote a blog. Forums are an especially effective method but certainly not the only one. Here are some others:

1. Write articles related to your blog and submit them to various article directories. Be sure to include a resource box linking to your blog.

2. Submit your blog to blog directories. Such do a search on Google for “blog directory” and you should get a bunch of them.

3. Use social networking sites like Myspace to promote your blog. Invite visitors to your Myspace site to visit your blog.

4. Exchange links with other bloggers. You can find potential link partners on forums. It’s better to seek partnership with related rather than non-related blogs.

5. Media sharing sites like Youtube is another potential source of traffic, if you’re into video making. Use the description field of Youtube to link to your site. If your video can somehow get millions of hits on Youtube, expect an avalanche of traffic to your site.

6. Tell friends and family about your blog. If you have a tendency to write things that might embarrass you, this may not be such a good idea.

7. Promote your blog through your business card, bumper sticker, t-shirt, etc. Be creative. The internet is a new media, so there are very rules that are set in stone.

Many people ask me, how do you promote a blog? Well, a blog is a website, so you promote a blog as you would any other site. But since blogs tend to be more personal and informal than typical websites, traditional techniques used to promote, say an e-commerce site, are equally effective for blogs.

First your blog should focus on a particular topic matter. Some people like to use their blogs to write about whatever comes to mind or rant about the 1001 injustices that life throws in their ways. Even if your blog falls into this category, chances are, there will a recurrent theme that surfaces over and over, and that theme would be your topic.

Once you’ve decided what your blog is about, go to Google.com and search for popular forums on your general topic. You should get a bunch of results. Pick only a handful– not more than five– of the most popular forums to join.

But before joining make sure the forum allows you to have signatures linking to your site. This is the least they can do for you for the time that you will put into to help add content to the forum.

It’s important that the forums you join are popular because you don’t want to waste your time contributing to ones that no one reads.

After you join the forums, become active on them. Use them to raise questions, answer questions, give advices, debate issues, and so on and so forth. But be sure to include a signature pointing to your blog.

Your signatures helps to promote your blog in two ways: (1) by helping to build links to your site and (2) by drawing direct visitors from people reading your message. Therefore, it’s important that you have something interesting to write because if people like what you have to say on the threads, they’ll check out your link to see what else you have to offer. Writing one-line responses simply to get links is not recommended since you risk getting flamed by other members and appearing like a village idiot.

As I’ve mentioned earlier blogs tend to be more personal and informal than other websites. Since forum exchanges share these traits, they complement each other very well. I’ve often come up with blog topics by reading the forums and vice versa.

Another point to keep in mind is that your fellow members on the forums are your peers. It’s important to avoid writing in a way that is condescending or even pedantic to your readers. Instead, write in peer-to-peer rather than a teacher-to-student perspective. This is true for both forum participation and blog entries.

I’m using this post to keep a running list of the top ten methods which I feel are the best strategies for building links to a website. This list is based on my own experience of building links to my sites throughout the years. It’s important to keep in mind that when it comes to SEO, nothing is set in stone. SEO is a cat-and-mouse game, so I will revise this list from time to time as the field continues to evolve.

Please note that the order in which these methods are listed do not necessarily reflect their order of effectiveness. Some methods may work better than others for certain sites.

1. Submit to web directories

Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building campaign. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

It’s important to note that not all directory listings are equal. Listings from trusted, established directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ are more valuable than those from the thousands of others on the net. All else being equal, a link from a directory focused on your site’s niche is worth more than one from a general directories.

Submit to both free and paid directories. Free directories provide one-way links to your site with no strings attached, but they can take forever to review your link. Paid listings can be a good investment if the fees are reasonable and the pages on which your link will reside have decent PRs. Your sites will be listed with fewer competing links on paid directories.

2. Write articles and press releases

Submitting your article to directories is a highly effective way to build one-way links to your site. First, you write a thoughtful and informative article on an topic in your area of expertise. Then you submit it to article directories to be read by the general public and reprinted on other web sites. Appended to the end of your article is a “resource box” which contain links to your site and email address.

While there are hundreds or even thousands of article directories on the web, you should focus on writing a high quality article and submitting to a handful of the more popular ones. Having your article published on a top directory can be worth more than a hundred less reputable ones. If you write something that people find useful, they may pick it up and reprint it on their blogs, newsletters, etc. This is how a quality article propagates virally in cyberspace– it virtually distributes itself without your having to manually submit to a thousand article directories.

3. Exchange links with related sites

Online forums like Digitalpoint are an excellent place to find reciprocal linking partners. Avoid sending out spammy e-mail solicitations like those generated by many SEO software programs. I get dozens of these everyday.

4. Make use of social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites help bring together internet users from every corner of the world into a virtual global village. Submitting content to sites like Digg.com, YouTube.com and Del.icio.us can bring lots of visitors in a hurry.

It’s important to understand that sites like Digg and YouTube are not necessarily shock sites. Although there is some publicity to be gained from the shock value of an article or video, one must not resort to tasteless and offensive materials to gain attention. There is only so much value in the attention gotten by being the village idiot.

5. Buy text links on other sites

Although link buying is somewhat an unnatural way to build links, it may be the only way to increase your link popularity if your site is not unique or interesting enough to get people to link to you on their own. Most commercial sites fall into this category.

You should buy links in a way that simulates natural linking as much as possible. Buy text links from sites that are related to yours. Vary anchor texts and descriptions. Buy links from internal as well as home pages. Buy links from both high- and low-PR sites (which can be gotten at a bargain prices).

6. Participate in online forums

Sharing knowledge can be a very powerful way to establish your online presence and credibility. If you check your backlinks on search engines like Google and Yahoo!, you may notice that a number of them come from the signatures of forum posts– that is, if you post in forums. Most forums allow signature links. I don’t participate in forums that don’t as allowing them is the least the forums can do to compensate me for contributing to their contents.

7. Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours

This often overlooked strategy can be a great source of “natural” one-way inbound links. I have gotten many of my links this way. The days are long gone when all you had to do to get people to link to you was to have a decent website out there. Nowadays you have to be more proactive by approaching other webmasters and asking them to link to you.

Do a search on Google on the keywords that you want to target. Visit the sites on the first few pages of the search results to see if they link to other sites (look for “links” or “resources” pages). Then write to the ones that you think might be interested in linking to your site. If your site is seen as a complement rather than a direct competitor to the site you want to be linked from, you stand a higher chance of getting a positive response.

8. Ask vendors and clients to link to your site

I once bought a $350 script package and asked my vendor if they could feature my site as site made with their script. They obliged and gave me a PR7 text link from their site. Since the link is worth at least $40 a month, my initial investement for the script has paid for itself many times over. Besides the SEO benefits, it is responsible for thousands of visitors to my site a month through direct clicks. The moral of the story: don’t be afraid to ask. The worse that could happen is that they say “no”.

9. Blogging

Setting up a blog is a no-brainer. Even if you’ve no web designing experience whatsoever, you have a blog up and running in no time. Blogs allows for a more informal setting to get your words across. So, it’s much easier to write a blog entry than an article to submit to article directories. Use your blog to share knowledge, voice opinions, connect with others with similar interests, and of course, to link to your other sites.

Avoid spamming blog networks like Blogger and MySpace. These spam blogs (”splogs”) are a waste of time as they will not get much attention from people and will yield little, if any, SEO benefits. Write about something you know and have a genuine interest in. Focus on quality rather than quantity.

10. Content is king

Yes, content is still king. In fact, content is by far the most important of the ten strategies I’ve mentioned. Having fresh, unique, engaging content is an excellent way to attract natural linking from other sites. This is the type of links that search engines like.

You may have heard of the buzz phrase, link-baiting, that is being tossed around in the SEO community nowadays. The idea is to get others to link to you voluntarily, perhaps by causing some type of sensation or controversy on YouTube, Digg, the message boards, or whatever. Link-baiting, in my opinion, is no more than a new play on the old “content is king” mantra.

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Honorable Mentions:

(These are the strategies that didn’t quite make the Top Ten list but are nevertheless deserving of consideration. Some of them may at one point have been in the top ten but had since been removed to make room for a new one.)

Write testimonials and reviews

Writing a glowing review about a product or service and submitting to your vendor or service provider can give you a very high quality link back to your site. But this strategy can prove time-consuming as many vendors publish only a handful of testimonials from their customers. Don’t waste your time by sending a testimonial to a vendor who does not have a “Testimonials” page on their site. When submitting a review or testimonial, don’t forget to mention to your vendor that they should be feel free to publish your comments on their site (along with a link to your site).

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Top Ten List Change Log:

v.1.0.1 (07/05/11) Minor edit

v.1.0.5 (07/05/16) Moderate edit

v.1.1.0 (07/06/06) Strategy #7, “Write testimonials and reviews” replaced with “Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours”. “Testimonials” moved to “Honorable Mentions”.

By Sharon Housley

RSS is growing at a lightening speed. What was once only known as a “techie tool”, RSS is becoming a tool that is continuously being used by the general population. Along with the good comes, the not so good. And while some have mentioned the emergence of RSS spam, where content publishers dynamically generate nonsensical feeds stuffed with keywords, the real concern relates to security. While an annoyance to the search engines, spam in RSS feeds pales in comparison to the possible security concerns that could be in RSS’ future.

Security Implications Related to RSS.

As RSS gains momentum security fears loom large. As publishers are quickly finding innovative uses for RSS feeds, hackers are taking notice. The power and extendibility of RSS in its simplest form is also its achilles heel. The expansion capabilities of the RSS specification, specifically the “enclosure” field which has launched the podcasting phenomenon, is where the vulnerabilities lie. The enclosure field in itself is not the problem, in fact the majority of RSS feeds do not even use the enclosure tag. The enclosure tag is essentially used to link to file types, things like images, word documents, mp3 files, power point presentations, and executables and can be thought of in similar terms to email attachments.

The fact that RSS can be used to distribute these file types has opened a myriad of doors to users of the syndication standard, but also has created cause for concern. Most people do not feel that the risk is significant because people “choose” the content that they receive, and while it might make the distribution of malware, viruses and spy applications via RSS less prevalent, their is still the inherent risk of a infected file being distributed.

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