Sunday, September 18, 2011
Five Ways To Quickly Build Backlinks (and Get Relevant Traffic)
If you're a small business or consultancy, building backlink. to your website can be an effective way to gain relevant traffic and grow your business-no matter what your industry.
Here are five ways to kick off your link-building with ease.
1. Guest-Blogging
Guest-blogging is an incredible method for building backlinks. You can go about it in several ways...
Search for guest-blogging opportunities using queries such as "write for us," "submit post," and "become a contributor." Those queries are the most basic and yield the best results, though you can try others.
You can also turn to networks that connect those looking for guest-blogging opportunities with blogs that need new content. The largest of those networks is MyBlogGuest.com . It allows you to upload your article for others to use, contact bloggers who are seeking new contributors, and chat and connect with others in the guest-blogging community.
You can also search for relevant blogs within your niche and pitch your guest blog post to them. Getting your article posted this way is more difficult, but if your content fits with the blog's theme and it's well written, you have a decent chance. Links from such sources tend to be of the highest authority and can really help your link profile.
2. PR Networks
Several free subscription services online bring together reporters, bloggers, and authors looking for answers to specific questions. Using sites such as HARO , Reporter Connection , PitchRate , and the paid service ProfNet is a simple way to earn links to your website.
The sites basically work like this: Reporters ask questions about specific topics; you respond if the questions pertain to your area of knowledge; the reporter credits you as a source usually via a backlink. Simple!
You can also try your luck on FlackList , a public relations social media site. I would liken it to Facebook for public relations.
HARO sends three daily emails, each containing 30-70 queries. Receiving hundreds of queries a day, five days a week, you will surely find a blog to contribute to sooner rather than later. Via HARO, I have earned dozens of backlink. and have been featured on the websites of FOX News and The Huffington Post, to name a couple.
Reporter Connection and PitchRate usually send one email per day. The networks are smaller with fewer queries, but equally important to your backlink-building strategy. Both are free services.
3. Reviews and Giveaways
If you run an e-commerce site, product reviews can be one of the simplest and most effective ways of building backlinks. Thousands of bloggers are looking for various products to review and give away. And once your product is featured on one giveaway site, you will likely receive emails from others asking for the opportunity to do the same on their blogs.
Search for those bloggers on Google using variations of the query "product reviews." The difficult part is deciding which bloggers are worth your time and effort.
Giveaways work the same way, although when done properly they will also get you mentions on social media sites. You can also gain links by posting the giveaway details on your own site and promoting the giveaway on sites like tipjunkie.com .
4. Blog Commenting
When done right, blog commenting can be an effective way to build links. The key is to comment only on very relevant blogs and posts. Despite "no follow" tags, such comments can help you rank, in part by sending others to your site-and if they like what they see, they'll link to you. But make sure to keep your comments interesting and useful.
You can also search for or follow blogs that are not moderated. Those will generally be much less relevant and will require much less effort. The problem is you get what you pay for: Little time and effort result in little authority. Commenting on such blogs is likely a waste of time. Not enough is known about how Google examines a link profile for me to recommend doing it. But if you have a strong link profile, you can throw a couple comments out there without fear of hurting yourself.
5. Submissions to Niche Sites
Is your site unique and visually attractive? Submit it to one of the various CSS galleries. Is your business idea off the wall, but useful? Submit it to Springwise.com .
A multitude of niche sites are just waiting to feature your brand and link back to you. All it takes is a little ingenuity and good research skills. Those sites will pass you gallons of link juice and send you traffic, providing even more opportunities for links.
Wait, There's More...
Of course, you can earn quick and easy backlinks via other methods, too, such as...
Squidoo, Hub pages, etc.
Bookmarking sites
Blogging (effective, but the links are not heavily weighted until the blog is established)
Press releases
Email outreach
Video and image submissions
Link building need not be difficult. Learn what you can by reading up on the subject, gain experience by actually trying what you read, and write articles like this to help others (and gain backlinks yourself).
Google | Google Beats Bing In Q1, Game Not Over - Facebook!
Microsoft is still chasing Google in search ads. Facebook may be its own rocket.
A report on search advertising in the first quarter of 2011 by Efficient Frontier, an online advertising analysis and consulting firm, shows that Google is still overwhelmingly dominant in the amount of money it gets from search advertisers. Microsoft's Bing, which has absorbed much of Yahoo's search business, appears to have suffered some customer leakage, but may be winning them back in important categories.
Efficient Frontier also tracked a sharp increase in activity and spending on ads in Facebook, which it counts as a category separate from either search or display advertising. The company didn't break the Facebook numbers out with much granularity "there was 40% cost per click growth in Marketplace ads (those are the ones that appear on the right hand side, and seem to sometimes know about you " they are bid at in auction, like search ads.) EF also said there was a 300% increase in ad inventory.
Given the relative newness of aggressive Facebook advertising, and the lack of any base numbers, however, it is hard to tell how significant the growth is. In another recent report, EF said advertisers get 37% more impressions on Facebook for 6% of their Google budgets. Facebook ads tend to lack Google's call to action, however, so the results aren't as good " at least initially. EF and others have found that a mix of outlets is necessary to create both initial sales and lasting relevance.
For the quarter, Google gained slightly, with 79.1% of all paid search marketing spend, versus 20.9% for Bing (Note: Other search engines like Blekko and Ask also get paid, but their shars are so tiny that putting them in might actually distort the comparative results, EF says.) That was up from 78.7% and 21.3%, respectively, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Compared with a year ago, Google killed it: Back then it had 74.2% of the paid search market, compared with 7% for Microsoft and 18.8% for Yahoo, the paid search of which has since disappeared into Microsoft.
No expert here, but that nearly five percentage point move came from marketers leaving Yahoo for Google over Bing. Microsoft surely has to win them back. The report shows that Bing had a better ROI than Google, up 10% compared with a year ago, while Google was down 12% from a year ago. Bing also increased the number of ads that were clicked on, reversing a yearlong trend that had benefited Google.
Impressions are back to year-ago levels, and have fallen at Google, so Bing may already be coming back. In particular, Bing did well in finance and retail, but lost market share in travel. Last week's U.S. government decision allowing Google to purchase air travel information business ITA Software could make it even harder for Bing to compete in travel. Google also picked up slightly in the automotive category. Of the four categories, however, Bing is picking up in the two that improved the most, in terms of spending.
Outside the US, Google remained dominant, with an unchanged 91% share of spend in the UK, and even higher in France, Germany, and Australia. Only in Japan, where Yahoo remains an important player, was there any real competition, 52.8% of spend for Google against 47.2% for Yahoo. Search ad spending was still increasing in Japan, despite the effect of the earthquake and tsunami late in the first quarter.
Internet Money | Police Nab Seven, Including Three Foreigners, For Fraudulent Internet Money Transfer
September 14, 2011 19:29 PM
Police Nab Seven, Including Three Foreigners, For Fraudulent Internet Money Transfer
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 14 (Bernama) -- The police have detained seven people, including three foreign men, in connection with fraudulently transfering RM250,000 through the internet recently.
The foreigners are from Sierra Leonne, Jordan and Pakistan. Of the remaining four suspects, three are local women.
The seven, aged between 20 and 27, were picked up at several locations in the Millenium Square, Petaling Jaya in a three-day operation, beginning Sept 10.
A computer, savings account books, subscriber identity module (SIM) cards, copies of identity cards and other relevant documents were seized from the suspects who were remanded until Thursday.
Bukit Aman Commercial Crime Investigation Department director Datuk Syed Ismail Syed Azizan said Wednesday, the police opened an investigation paper early this year, after 12 cases involving losses totalling RM242,321.14, were reported.
He said initial investigations revealed that a syndicate had used special software to obtain a victim's internet banking information, including telephone number. He said this was done upon downloading information from a bank kiosk after the victim had carried out a transaction at the kiosk.
"Following this, a syndicate member impersonating a telecommunications personnel would telephone the victim to say that his line would be disrupted for a few hours for upgrading purposes.
"A local member of the syndicate, masquerading as the victim, would go to a branch of the telecommunications firm, with a forged police report and a copy of the victim's identity card, to cancel the said victim's SIM card and obtain a replacement."
Syed Ismail added that the new SIM card would be used to get the transaction authorisation code to perform the transfer transaction over the internet.
Further investigations revealed that the syndicate's last fraudulent transfer was on Aug 27, in Petaling Jaya, involving losses amounting to RM50,000, he said.
Syed Ismail said the procedure to replace SIM cards must be further tightened while internet banking security should be stepped up.
"Internet banking account holders must constantly inspect transactions on their accounts and avoid exposing internet banking information, whether through e-mail or telephone calls," he said.
-- BERNAMA
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Google | Google Flight Search Vs. Kayak
On Tuesday, Google unveiled Google Flight Search "a competitor to Kayak , Travelocity , Expedia and other airfare-shopping sites.
This is the first real fruit borne from Google's purchase of ITA Software , a flight and airfare-information company that Google bought in July of 2010. Since ITA sells flight information to a number of travel sites (like Kayak, Orbitz and Hotwire ), after scrutiny of the deal by the Justice Department, Google had to make assurances that it wouldn't keep ITA's best parts for its own uses.
For a quick comparison, I ran a few searches on Google Flight Search and Kayak. Here's what I found:
Google is faster. Pages loaded about eight seconds faster on Google than they did on Kayak. This may not seem like a lot, but when you're doing repeated searches and adjustments and reloads, it's noticeable.
Google is simpler. The default view you get when you search for a flight on Google are all the outbound flights. When you select one, you then see the return flights that are available with that outbound ticket. This is better than Kayak's presentation, because Kayak shows pairs of flights for the destination and date you've selected. With that view, you get all the 9:30 a.m. flights listed with all their matching return flights. There's a lot of redundancy. Google's simplified view is better.
One quibble with Google's layout: The results of the return flights are in a lightly delineated box that appears amidst the departing fares. Unfortunately, the box is not marked as clearly as it could be (you can kind of see this in the example, at right) and may cause some confusion when you are staring at columns of letters and numbers.
Kayak's results are more comprehensive. Searching for a flight from Miami to Dallas in late October, Kayak showed a US Airways flight departing at 6:15 a.m. On Google Flight Search, the earliest flight was at 6:50 a.m. That earlier flight cost twice as much as the later one, but for some people, schedule may be more important than cost. Google has said that it is aware that Flight Search is limited right now (it has no international flights, for example), and that it will be adding more flights in the future.
Kayak's fare map is better. Both services offer vacationers a useful tool - a map showing how much a ticket to various destinations costs from a selected departure city. If you live in New York, for example, you can see that the lowest fare to Charleston, S.C., costs $160, while a flight to Funafuti Atol in Tuvalu will set you back no less than $2,690. But just as Google's results are limited, so is its map at this point; Kayak's map is densely packed with cities and other destinations, where Google's is sparsely populated with places to go.
Google's filters and viewing tools are cooler. Kayak has the usual fare matrix, which shows number of stops on one axis and airlines on another, but Google slices up the data in two interesting and useful ways. The first is a matrix that has price on one axis and overall flight time on another, shown below. Sliding up, down and around the axes filters flights by cost and duration.
The other view is a bar graph that accompanies a calendar, shown below. The graph shows prices for round-trip fares on different days. It's an easy way to discover that, for example, if you leave one day earlier, your fare will be $100 cheaper, or if you fly out the next week it will drop $200. Google's approach is more revealing than the 3 day option most sites have, and while Kayak does have a fare chart showing highs and lows over an extended period of time, Google's is interactive, making it more useful.
Final verdict: Kayak (for now). Google's brought some good thinking to sorting through airfare information, but it does have an Achilles' heel; right now, it doesn't have as many flights as the competition. In the end, you can dress up the data all you want (and they are very nice dresses, I must say), but if you're looking for flights, you're a little like Gary Oldman in The Professional: You want every one . Playing around with graphs and sliders is cool and all, but it doesn't help you much if there's an earlier flight you want and you're not seeing it.
But Google's a pretty big company. They seem to have some smart people there. In all likelihood, they'll adapt. And so will Kayak. Hopefully, the biggest winners here are travelers.