Believe it or not, one of the best ways to get increased exposure for your company is to publish content on websites other than your own. Are you thinking, “Who the heck would let me do that?” The answer is lots and lots and lots of places – once you know how to find and approach them. Sometimes called “influencing” sites, this is a fantastic form of online public relations that, when done correctly, gets you tons of exposure and lots of backlinks. What Is Guest Blogging? Guest blogging simply means being allowed to publish a blog or other information as a guest on someone else’s site. Generally you can include at least one link to your site and a short author biography. Sometimes a site will want specific information, like a proposed topic and outline, before you post; but other sites want guest bloggers so much that you’re almost guaranteed to be able to post something there. One very easy way to find sites that allow guest bloggers is using specific terms in the Google search bar. These can include: inurl: “guest post” – This will find pages with the words “guest post” somewhere in the page URL. intitle:…

The SEO world has been changing of late, especially since the release of Google’s recent Panda and Penguin updates. One major shift has been in how Google tracks and analyzes internal keyword links on websites and online publications. Gone are the days when you could just stuff your sites or documents with keyword links which were partially or even totally unrelated to your subject matter. Today, creating effective internal site links has become something of a very precise art form in order to rank high in Google search results, but always the focus must be on creating links that people will naturally want to use to find more information. It’s become a matter of quality versus quantity. How Google Sees Links In Google’s view, someone who clicks on a link to a site is “voting” for that site. More “votes” for a site means that lots of people find it valuable which gives it a higher Google ranking. However, the recent updates are all about reducing the amount of spam in the ranking lists, so Google’s algorithm is now consistently checking for unnatural links which, when found, will move a site down in the results list. Some of the specific…

Today’s hot topic is how SEO is shifting from being a back-office operation of applying formulas to a website, blog, or other block of online text to a very social one based on online PR. To get an idea of what we’re talking about, take a look at Rand Fiskin’s five minute video, Anchor Text is Dying And Will Be Replaced By Co-citation. The Old Ways Are Dying In the fast-moving world of SEO, anchor text keywords were the traditional way that we told Google what we were talking about. If you were trying to make your site Jones Real Estate high ranking for “real estate in Louisville, KY,” you might hyperlink those words to a page in your website. You would also add a title tag that would say, in essence, “Hey, Google, this article is about buying and selling homes in the Lou, where Realtor® Mary Jones is an expert.” Google, which ranks pages based on a secret algorithm, would consider links like that as the main factor in ranking the page. As of April 2012, Google changed the rules so anchor text linking is now less important. Building Associations And Reputation Rand Fishkin talks about this concept…