So, do me a favor and check your backlinks and make sure they don’t point to any 404 pages. If they do, 301 Redirect them to a more appropriate page and harness the power of those hard to earn links. Do not 302 redirect as that is a temporary redirect which will not pass pagerank.

I suggest using the http://www.seomoz.org/labs/backlinks & http://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages tool.

www.widgets.com/blue-widgets

I say this is a problem because not only have you maybe linked to this page maybe so have the other websites as well and then when you do a header check on this url you will see that it is usually a 301 or 302 redirect to the following:

www.widgets.com/blue-widgets/

See the difference? the 2nd one is the one with the trailing slash /. This does make a difference as on most server setup’s this is a 301 redirect from the top link to the bottom link. Yes, all the search engines should be counting 301 redirect links but some take time to do this and this is just a simple discipline that you can use internally to never have to rely on the search engines to value all of your links and fix them for you.

The other problem you can run into is that some setups actually count these as 302 redirects which:

301 Permanent redirects pass page rank/link juice
302 Temporary redirects do NOT pass page rank/link juice

Now, does your website link to internal pages without a trailing / ? Does it do a redirect? Check your header redirects here: http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

If blog commenting spam can hurt both site’s rankings, then why not go build 10,000 of them to your competitors with the exact same anchor text on all links?

For that exact reason above, this is not true. Now, let me say that if you have a backlink profile that has this type of links from the blog commenting then those links can/will be devalued it seems and yes they could then decrease your backlinks which would inturn lower your rankings. But do not believe that they can hurt you in any other way then those links being devalued for the pages/anchor text you were going after.

Hopefully this will explain a little more insight into the latest comments/posts floating around the internet.

First, let’s start by understanding that your default links from your info page are no-followed. In all examples posted below anything that is highlighted in pink means the links are nofollowed. (I am using the seomoz toolbar to highlight these nofollowed links)

Now the next area most would think is ok I can make wall posts and include a link back to my website which will pass link juice. WRONG! Let’s look at links posted to our Facebook fan page and see that they are also no-followed as well:

So as you can see here on the left, the actual link posted within the content of the story is the link to http://adwords.google.com which is actually no-followed (in pink).

If you notice the source of the story is actually a redirect which the link is http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.seotipaday.com%252F2009%252F09%252F16%252Fseo-tip-of-the-day-understanding-google-ppc-vs-seo%252F&h=7cc27cf8a82e35daaee4b91949d0c134&ref=mf

When checking the header of this redirect you will see that it is a 302 temporary redirect which DOES NOT pass link juice.

So now that we understand the normal facebook links you get from your fan pages and how they do not pass link juice, let’s explain how to get those link juice passing links.

#1) Browse applications

#2) Search FBML

#3) Add to your page

#5) Name your box, and create your html content
Remember when inputting your html here that if you are using images to use an alt tag <img src=”logo.jpg” alt=”keyword”>. Using an alt tag within your images will help let the search engines know what your image is about aka anchor text for a text link.

#6) Choose if you want it as a tab, or better yet have it as a wall box like we have done, YOUR DONE!

So now this link is a clean link that is followed from my facebook Fan page! (which you should join) You can also input text links, if you would prefer. But for those that struggle to try to monetize Facebook this is another great way to continue to brand/promote your services/products on your default page.

Most would ask, why does this link count? We’ll its one of the most trusted sites on the internet with millions of links to the root domain and also check your PageRank of your fan page. I have seen fan pages that have PR4-6, remember all those pages on your site that you link to your facebook fan page? Those pass link juice if you are not no-following those.

Enjoy! I hope this tutorial was useful.

Widgets:  Build a widget, like a calculator, a Firefox extension, or an iPhone application and add a link back to your site.

Articles:  Write articles with good content and spin them so you don’t have to write several articles.  When writing the articles, put links using keywords back to some of your inner pages.  Submit these articles to article sites like http://www.ezinearticles.com and http://www.goarticles.com.  You can write an article or press release and send it to your local online paper with links back to your site.

Contests:  If you hold a great contest, bloggers will blog about you and link to your site.

Lists:  Write a list, like “10 easy link-building tips” or “The top 10 internet marketing gurus” and post it on Twitter so others will see it, especially the gurus.  If the gurus like your post, they will write about it on their site and link back to you, or they will Tweet about it.

Social Media Sites:  Set up a Twitter account for your business and put your webpage link on your Twitter page.  Set up a FaceBook Page.  Link your Twitter and FaceBook pages.  Have links on your website that link to each of your pages on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.  Have areas to retweet your blog posts and links to place your information on Stumbleupon, Technorati, Delicious, Digg, etc.  Put a listing of your business into dmoz.org.  Create a Squidoo page and give useful information about your business, or put a link to your widget or tool on the page.

Outbound Links:  Google sees relevant outbound links as being almost as important as back-links.  Link to relevant sites with high Page Rank.  Link to education sites and to government sites that are relevant to your website or blog.  Ask for a link when you make a sale to a customer and ask for links from your suppliers when you place an order.

Create a page:  In Wikipedia, create a page about something your business does or look for a wiki with a relevant topic.  You can add to a page that is already there that is relevant to your topic and then add yourself at the bottom as a reference.  This is tricky and you can’t spam Wikipedia, but they have great link juice if you can do it correctly.

Contributions:  Donate to a charity and ask for a link from their page to yours.  Make quality content contributions to forums and blogs, not spam, and link back to your site using your keywords.

Content:  Write useful content and write controversial content!  People like to talk about controversial topics and will blog about your content.  It’s also great to put a blog on your site because you are adding content regularly and Google loves that.  Email your friends and business acquaintances and have them read and Tweet your posts.

There are hundreds of ways to get links from others and this is list of just a few.  Make sure you do this naturally:  you don’t want 100 links in a day.  Also, make sure your content is relevant and of good quality so people will actually want to come to your site.  If you help others with their problems or give them quality information, they will be back!

SEO Pros & Cons:

• SEO is initially very expensive.  Once you have done the initial setup cost of SEO, however, you no longer have to pay for every click.  In the long run, SEO is less expensive than continuing with a PPC campaign.  After all, SEO has zero cost per click!
• It takes longer for your efforts to show up with SEO, but once optimization is finished and your website is showing up in the first page of the search results, maintenance costs are minimal.
• If you do your homework and research the correct keywords (including long-tail keywords), you can drive the traffic you want where you want it to go, even to internal pages.  SEO is time intensive but works really well if done correctly.
• When asked, most people will say they trust and pay attention to main listings more than paid listings.  Also, 80% of people click on the top three organic links on a search engine results page.

There are several things to think about when deciding upon a PPC or SEO campaign.  I think the best thing to do, for a new site especially, is a combination of both PPC and SEO.  You can start off a new website with PPC since you won’t have the domain age or the indexing of pages.  You can optimize and add pages, either via a blog or regular web pages, and continue with the PPC while you’re waiting for your optimization efforts to work.  PPC is a good way to test keywords before optimizing for them to see what people are clicking on. The keyword might not do as well as anticipated and you can then eliminate that keyword in your future optimization efforts.  SEO analytics can also be used with PPC – a keyword in your statistics that someone is searching for (that you had not thought of or anticipated) could be put into PPC to capture those particular customers.  You can also use PPC for long-tail and inexpensive keywords and optimize for the more expensive PPC keywords.

You can see that it is not really a matter of Google PPC vs. SEO.  Both can be done to strategically optimize your site and keep your costs down.  It’s a matter of what will work best for your website, your budget, and your marketing strategy.

Organic SEO is a process of optimizing (or having someone optimize) your site for particular keywords so that your website shows up in the top of the natural search results, not in Sponsored Links.  This is called organic or natural SEO because your website naturally drifts to the top as it becomes more “relevant” for the keywords for which people are searching.

There are many advantages and disadvantages of both PPC and SEO.  Here are the pros and cons of both and you can decide what works best for you.

Google PPC Pros & Cons:

• There is no impact on your website content.  When optimizing a site, there are several things you need to change on a website and sometimes website owners don’t like these changes.  With PPC, there are no changes made to your website.
• Traffic starts flowing instantly to your site for the keywords you choose in PPC.  However, don’t forget that there is no limit to the amount you can spend.  As long as you have ads and people are clicking on them, you will be paying per click.
• Instant analyzing capabilities in Google PPC:  You have access to real-time analytics with Google.
• You can buy a first position, although if this is a competitive keyword, it will be very expensive.
• You can control the amount you want to spend per day and how long to run the campaign.  You only pay when a customer clicks on your ad, and you don’t have to pay for optimization of your site.
• You can decide which and how many keywords you would like to use.
• You can limit your keyword searches to geographical areas.  For example, you can target an area around your city or various cities.  I have found it works better, when advertising locally, if you actually put the local keyword into PPC, for example “air conditioning Manhattan Kansas” rather than having the keyword be “air conditioning” and relying on Google to make the geographical determination.
• Users are sometimes suspicious of “paid for” listings.  It was reported in a study (http://www.entrepreneurship.fiu.edu/downloads/marc_resnick/Research/An%20empirical%20study%20of%20paid%20listings%20in%20product%20search%20and%20purchase.pdf)  that “for paid listings to yield the financial results that are anticipated by the business community, it is critical that consumers perceive paid listings and their descriptions as relevant to their transactional tasks…Participants in the study showed a bias against paid listings in several ways. They reported an explicit suspicion about paid listings in their verbal protocols. They rated the relevance of the paid listings as lower than the organic listings despite the content of the descriptions being controlled across listing type”.
• Click fraud is a real possibility from competition.  If your competition knows about you and wants to make you pay, they can click on your ad as many times as they would like.
• PPC is good for promotional or short-term traffic.   You don’t have to optimize an entire page and wait for it to be indexed if you want to promote a sale or some other short-term ad.  You can set up your ads with keywords in PPC, use them for a short time, and then turn them off.

Tomorrow I will explain the advantages and disadvantages of SEO and how I think you can best use Google PPC & SEO to drive traffic to your site.

Many webmasters notice that they are getting more traffic from Digg than from Google. The other popular social bookmarking sites, such as Del.isio.us, Reddit, Technorati, or Propeller are also known for their ability to crash your server with traffic. If your submissions manage to hit the frontpage of any of these sites, you will experience an incredible peak in traffic, followed by a substantial number of daily hits for the years to come. If your content becomes popular on any of the major social bookmarking sites, this will beat your traffic from Yahoo!, Bing, and probably even Google.

Social networking sites (or sites such as Twitter, which are not exactly social networking sites the way we know them) are also gaining momentum. For instance, Facebook has already become an institution and similarly to Digg, it can drive you more traffic than Google (even for top positions for competitive keywords). Maybe this inevitably poses the question, if it is worth to invest time and money in Google optimization, when you can get all this traffic for free.
Well, any traffic is welcome, so you can’t just forget about Google. Additionally, it is not precise to say that you are getting the traffic from social media for free, especially when you calculate the amount of time you spend on these sites in order to develop a network. All these social bookmarking and social networking sites work well only if your network is impressive. Even if your content is top notch, when there are no people to notice it and support it, it is quite likely that your content will end with a couple of votes only.

In addition to driving traffic directly to your site, social media can help SEO in one more precious way – by rewarding your efforts with backlinks. How is this possible? When you submit a link, you will notice that very often this link gets the ‘nofollow’ attribute. This is bad for you because such a link doesn’t count for SEO purposes (or at least not with Google). This might feel unfair but the ‘nofollow’ attribute is quite logical because if social bookmarking sites didn’t add it, they would have turned into link farms overnight.

However, you can get backlinks thanks to social media. If you post viral content (no matter if it is a video, an audio, a pic, or text) and people like it, they will start distributing it. Also, they will start blogging about it and it is quite possible that they will link back to your site. This is how you get your backlink. For really popular submissions, it is possible to get 100 or more backlinks – this is much more than you can get for free and without any effort from any other place! You just can’t afford to neglect this avalanche effect of social media, so even if you are happy with the traffic you get from search engines, consider diversifying your portfolio.

Why Are Internal Links so Good for SEO?

Internal links are great in terms of SEO because as any other link, they are followed by Google and are counted as a vote for the page the link leads to. If your site is a high-ranking one, internal links are even more valuable.

Additionally, unlike external links, where dishonest partners will put the ‘nofollow’ attribute without telling you, thus rendering the link to almost useless for SEO purposes, with internal links there isn’t such a risk.

In any case, even if internal links weren’t good for SEO, they are vital for navigation and site’s usability as a whole, so you need to treat them right.

How Can I Use Internal Links to Get Higher PR?

One of the cutest tricks (and the best is that it is a legal one) you can do with internal links is to raise the page rank for crucial pages. For instance, let’s say you have a Products page you want to actively promote. In such case, if you put links to the Products page on every single page of your site, this will boost the number of backlinks considerably, which in turn will place it higher with search engines.

Of course, you might ask why only the Product page deserves this special treatment. Sure, nobody stops you from placing links to every single page on every single page but there is a slight risk that such a practice could be interpreted as link spamming. Well, this is not that risky, especially if you do it professionally and not in a spammy way but it is much more valuable, if you direct all your efforts to one or a few critical pages.

If we continue the above example, the Products page is a critical one because when users are searching, they will hardly search for your Disclaimer, or About Us – they are most likely to search for products and that is why you need to take care that your Products page gets special treatment. In a sense, it pays more to promote the Products page than the Disclaimer or About Us ones.

Some More Tips and Tricks about Internal Links

If you want to use internal links effectively and improve your PR, here are some more tips to consider:

• As with any link, the anchor text is very important. If you are new to SEO, you might still use “click here”, “check this” or similar anchor texts and wonder why this is not working. You need to choose your anchor text wisely. For instance, you can have the word “products” as anchor text but it is much better if you have a keyword instead (i.e. if you are selling netbooks, don’t use “products” as anchor text but use “Asus netbook”, or “MSI netbook”, or only “netbooks” because this has your keywords).
• Take advantage of both intext links and links that are present on every page (i.e. the footer or sidebars). In the above example we discussed mainly intext links (i.e. links you put into the text of your site) but you can also use internal links, which are part of the structure of the site.  For instance, have a look at the following screenshot:

All the entries in the ZDNet News & Blogs, Product Reviews, Product Blogs, etc. sections are actually links to other pages. This not only makes it easier for the user to find the stuff he or she needs but the links help for SEO purposes as well because they are from a page with a high PR and they have a keyword as an anchor text. Usually such internal links are links to sections, not separate pages but if your SEO purposes demand it, you can put a link to a separate page as well.

There are many more creative ways to put internal links to use. In any case, don’t ignore internal links – they can do a lot for your SEO success.