Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What I think is good or what you think is good doesn't really count. It's what people in the industry think is good. These days creating an article takes time and sometimes a team of people.

Step one research: What are relavent topics? Who has a real following (people who interact)? What are they currently talking about?

_Find related industry's topics that are trending. Find the social leaders for these industries. _

Step two add value: Do you agree with what they are talking about? Can you add something of value?

Read what the industry is currently all about. Add content to your blog that will educate or entertain these people.

Step three connect:  Can you network with the industry leaders?  Do these industry leaders have a google +/twitter/facebook. Where do these industry leaders hang out?

_Do whatever it takes to network. Buy the flowers, movie tickets, concert tickets. Find out who they really are and what they like. Build a relationship based on other things rather then business business business... _

**Please could someone point out what are the basic guidelines for writing good content for google & users ?           **

_                       "Give the people what they want and Google will give you to the people."_

Oh yes and this SEOmoz article really breaks it down: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-links-with-video-content

Hello John and welcome. You came to the right place.

I would recommend building links from local places to you keywords. If you are building links for your keywords within New York City, get links within New York City to point at your site. Definitely anchor your keywords, best to use diffirent variations of the keywords it looks more natural.

There are many ways to build links, my favorite is guest blogging. But for every niche there wil be a good strategy that works. You can refer to SEOmoz blog to learn more on link building and how to.

Also you might want to do some AB testing to check if your uses like your site. AB testing can be done within googles webmaster tools.

Hi Chase,

Our company can help you out with this project. We specialize in Search and we can give you many testimonial / real results that we achieved for many customers. PM me if you are interested in a free quote.

I cant tell you the answer to that, there are too many different opinions on the matter. What do they count? what dont they count? Now they are indirectly claiming to count what other can do to your site as well. In other words hurt your rankings. (aka negative SEO)

Ive read a few case studie and I found that it is best to link to your brand name 70% of the time and use the other 20% with keyword variation and lastly use 10% [Exact] keyword and you will be safe.

Doesn't Yext provide you with 30 featured listings rather than regular free listings?

They may have not been found yet.

Are they over optimizing? Many people say over optimizing is having you keyword in you H1, title, description, footer, etc. Other believe that it is having way too many keywords embedded within way too much content.

For ex. If a site has 10,000 words on their home page they can add their keyword 1,000 times in that text and only have a 10% ratio of keyword to content.

To think that Google will punish every site for having their keywords on their H1,Title, Body, Footer, etc. is not realistic IMO, because too many sites have been built like this and many good sites will be demoted.

You can report them to google. However, you are better off focusing on your own results. Spend your time building local links to your site.

I spend a good amount of time on SEO forums and I found a thread about building links within comments.. I personally don't see how putting my keyword in my name place and linking it to my site will benefit me, I feel like google is already on to this and no one is going to click on it. Is this a waste of time?

Thumbs up on SEOmoz makes us as users happy. However when we get a thumbs down i think we deserve to know why... Otherwise how do figure out what the user disliked.

IMO anytime someone wants to leave a thumbs down they should also have to put a comment down explaining why.

Google is good, however can they detect a proxy?

Simply trackback to the originals. As long as you trackback to the original content the search engines will know that this is not duplicate content.

If you are using Wordpress for your website simply click the "screen options" on top and check "send trackbacks." That will add the field.

I attached an example of the "screen options" tab with the "send trackbacks" selected.

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Links from other authoritative sites that are relavent and/or entertaining to your audience will help you gain authority. As long as the users that get to your site and like what they see, share what they see (give you an endorsement) and or bookmark it, you gain authority. Think of it from a user perspective, if you entertain them, educate them, or offer them something of interest they will naturally link to your site.

The anchors to your site must look natural as well. be sure that your inbound links are built mostly of your URL or brand name.

This is a good question you should contact Ann Smarty from my guest blog, she also happens to be an SEOmoz user...

http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/54095

Other related sites:

http://www.seosmarty.com/

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/ann-smarty/

Step one research:

Are there any similar contests out there? What does your contest offer that other don't?

How much time will it take the user to do the work/enter the contest?

Step two outreach:

Who are the social leaders in or related to your niche?

Can you get them involved?

What are they currently talking about?

Are they friendly? geeky? Can you make them you friends and have them share your contest? Maybe get them involved...

Step three Tracking:

Can you test this out before launching it to see how users interact?

How did the user find this contest? Can you find more users from this same source or related source?

Google Analytics?

Step four Social Media:

Can you create videos for the contest using you tube? http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dominating-youtube-search-and-related-videos-results-case-study

What will drive people on facebook/twitter to enter the contest?

Is this something worth investing in facebook/twitter adds?

Miamisrealtor is shorter and easier to remember. (If you do some keyword research you will find that both: "Miamis realtor" and  "Water front real estate miami" have barely any search volume https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS)Having a URL that your customers can remember and wont have problems typing is better in this case.

Exact domain are best however they are only best if there is traffic for the term.

IMO focus on building good links for your own site. It is completely up to you, however the time you invest trying to get them removed is probably better off spent branding your own site. If they are doing wrong things they will end up getting it. Everyone who f's with the big G eventually gets it.

Yes new links will help out. However if you follow the article I mentioned it has a great 6 month plan to regaining trust.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website

I would highly recommend using this article as your 6 month plan it has everything you need in it and in detail.

I dont think there is such a thing as "perfect SEO" (or perfect anything), I did a little research on this because it got me a bit nervous... I found this article http://www.webconfs.com/over-optimization-article-8.php... Last time Google was hinting a change to its algo's Panda kicked some sites. I wouldn't underestimate Googles "Hints"...

The article I mentioned explains the differences between overstuffing keywords and keeping it clean. Keeping a keyword to content ratio of 3-7% should keep you in the "safe" SEO area (for now).

You are searching on a broad scale.If you look to the left of the adwords tool, check the box that says [exact] the search volume for this exact phrase is 16