Here’s a heads-up on a link building WordPress plugin that I’ve been using and have seen great results with. In fact, it’s one of the best WordPress plugins I’ve ever seen.

Not only will it build automatic backlinks, it’ll build backlinks that do it all: link juice, authority, traffic and long-life in one mega-SEO hit.

How to Get Backlinks Automatically

The plugin is called Digi Auto Links, and it gives you automated backlinks for every single blog article you write.

Digi Auto Links gives you backlinks in all the right places – from sites that are relevant to your niche, which makes them much more valuable. These are high ranking, Panda-friendly links that would take you hours to get manually, but this plugin does it for you in mere seconds.

You can have manual control, or just set it to automatic and let it do its thing. I worked with it manually until I saw that it does a great job on its own, and now it is on 100% autopilot on my sites.

For the next two weeks the Digi Auto Links plugin is on sale for $27, and believe me, that’s a steal for a plugin that does so much! If you’ve got more than one blog, get the multiple site license for only $10 more – you can’t beat that.

In addition, it’s 100% guaranteed, so if you don’t like it (which I can’t imagine) you’ll get your money refunded, no questions asked.

Digi Auto Links:

• Saves you hours by completely automating backlink building for every post
• Creates gold-standard contextual backlinks automatically every time you post
• Hijacks targeted traffic and link juice from the top blogs in your niche
• Builds a 100% panda-friendly backlink network, with your blog at the center
• Gets your posts indexed at lightning speed

Go get it now!

Disclaimer: These links include my affiliate number. However, this is an unpaid review and it is for a product that I purchased, really like and use myself with excellent results.

Many people had great articles on Ezine that ranked well and sent visitors to their site. However, a lot of Ezine articles were crap, and many of those were also ranking on the first page of Google. Everybody dropped, good and bad alike.

So now the question is, should you continue to submit to Ezine for article marketing purposes? My answer is yes for a couple of reasons. One is that Ezine Articles was the best article marketing site before the update, and now they have made 5 changes to upgrade the quality of future article submissions:

1. Increased Quality Checks – Articles are spending twice as much time in the review process, and their editors are placing more focus on format, grammar, spelling, and consistency.
2. WordPress Plugin and API – No longer being accepted to avoid content duplication.
3. Dead Links – In the past, if you had a dead link Ezine gave you 5 weeks to fix it, with numerous notifications. Now you have 2 weeks to get it taken care of.
4. Membership Level – I think they’re being a little too strict on this, but now if you haven’t met their quality requirements within the first 10 articles you submit, you not only don’t reach Platinum level but are banned from submitting more articles. They have backpedaled a little though, saying that if you are showing progress they’ll be a bit more lenient.
5. 400 Word Minimum – Before it was 250 words, and a good writer can often get their message across in that short of an article. That said, this makes writers work harder to write worthwhile content.

Life just got a little harder for article marketers, but I think it’s worth it to get high quality information on the Internet and in search results. What’s your opinion of these Ezine Article changes?

This is a guest article by Amit from SEO-Gavish at

קידום אתרים

The influence of the visitor

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the visitor’s contribution to the SEO process.

The opinions are different: some are claiming that the influence of each visitor is very high and Google is counting every visitor that left his credentials or made any other interaction during his site browsing.

Others are saying a visitor’s influence is minor and there is no way that Google will count visitors’ behavior during site ranking.

So which is the right one?

I would like to make some order in this matter and explain how the traffic affects the site ranking. I would like to emphasis a few points:

It’s not about the amount of traffic, but about its quality and about the visitor’s experience during the browsing of the site. In the past we used to think that the amount of visitors is crucial.

Let’s start with the basic SEO technique: Inbound Link Building

Every SEO person uses this technique in order to get higher Google ranking. The question is "What influence the visitor has to the link?"

Every time you are creating a link you need to think will this link contribute to the visitor and he will be able to use it or is it located on a page that no one is visiting. The purpose of the links is that visitors could follow them to our site. The problem is that today links are created mostly for the Google spider and without any though about the visitor.

Conclusion: It’s worth the effort to create useful links which will be followed by the visitors, a "live" link.

Till now we discussed the link building strategy, let’s continue.

The visitor is searching for the results in Google and gets a list of results. Your site is not the only one in the list, so the visitor will check other sites as well.

The visitor stages of behavior:

First, the visitor is looking at the list and decides which result he wants to click on and review. At this stage the visitor is directly influencing the ranking. If your site is located at the first page or in the first place, but visitor is not clicking on it, Google will understand that the site is not liked by visitors. (In some cases changing the description of the site will solve the problem).

Next stage will be viewing the site. So time of site viewing is an additional parameter of visitor influence. If the visitor is leaving your site during seconds, Google will understand that your site is not relevant or problematic. It is important to understand the next action of the visitor after leaving your site. Did he searched for the same value again and found more relevant site which he viewed longer? Or did he close his browser?

Reasons that may cause the visitor to leave your site quickly:

1. The visitor didn’t find what he looked for – your site is not relevant for the search request

2. The content of the site is not written well, unprofessional or not readable.

3. The site is designed badly and the graphics are poor. These days, the visitor is looking for an impressive site.

4. Menu and sidebars, site hierarchy and content are not clear enough. You must make the effort and plan a site that will be user friendly and clear enough so the visitor will enjoy using it without any effort.

5. Site upload speed is too slow. As our connection speed grows higher, the visitor’s patience becomes lower. The visitor will not wait for the site to be shown; he will look for other sites.

The influence of toolbars and connecting to Google sites accounts

Anyone who is familiar with the Alexa scale knows that it gathers the surfing information of Alexa users and ranks the sites based on that. Google is gathering information from any user logged on in Gmail or other Google account. Surfing the web using the Google toolbar is a highly effective information source. Google Chrome, although it is a relatively new browser, is used as an information source as well.

A few additional myths about the influence of human activity:

“A web site that is connected to Google Analytics will be ranked higher if the requests for additional information are created in it." I disagree with this statement, as this value can be easily falsely created, that’s the reason I find it hard to believe that it affects Google ranking. There is a difference between the request for additional information and actual sale in the web site.

An additional opinion I have heard recently is that amount of "LIKEs" the site is getting is influencing its ranking. This value can easily be a fraud, moreover, Google can’t read the "LIKE" source code.

These are a few examples of the human activity influence on the site ranking. It is important to understand that one of the aspects of SEO work is to make sure that the site will be relevant and user friendly, so that the visitor will find the information he was looking for and the site appearance will be welcoming.

Once your website looks great and has interesting, professional and relevant content, you will earn the visitor’s confidence he will come to your site again and he will not search for this information in a different website.

Good luck

Thank you, Amit, for sending us this article. You’ve made valid observations about the visitor’s affect on search rankings.

Although keyword research is the foundation for all SEO, and should be at the top of the effectiveness portion of the chart, the effort expended is on the low side:

It’s surprising that respondents did not indicate that keyword research required a high level of effort. In order to conduct effective keyword research that will drive results of SEO campaigns, a considerable amount of effort in research is required. This may be an indication of organizations executing incomplete keyword research.

Keyword Research – The Foundation

It’s very easy to conduct a quick review of keywords via Google’s keyword tool. However, that keyword tool was recently changed and doesn’t give results that are as trustworthy as they may have been in the past. Additionally, just because a keyword gets a lot of searches does not mean it will convert well or at all for your product or service offering.

My favorite tool for keyword research is Market Samurai, which includes competition analysis and monetization among many other valuable tools. You can get a free copy (does not include all modules) by clicking on the link.

Blogging for Fresh Content

I found it interesting that businesses perceive blogging as being very high in effort but low in effectiveness, yet developing new content is perceived as highly effective. Including a blog on a site means adding new content on a regular basis (hello). It’s content that gets crawled regularly, and can rank on it’s own merits.

Businesses are missing out on a huge source of ongoing, targeted, fresh content opportunities if they don’t include a blog or utilize their existing blog effectively.

Inbound Link Building

Ongoing link building is perceived as a high effort, highly effective tactic. Although some smaller, local businesses can get by with fewer links, those with a lot of competition must keep inbound link building work going all the time in order to get and maintain their rankings. My company has a department dedicated to inbound link building for our clients.

The link building work we perform is predicated on keyword research – aha – and now we’re back to the value of spending more time on keyword research to improve SEO!

It’s a time consuming process though…you have to decide on a topic, research and write the article, create an optimized title that contains your keywords, write an effective resource box that contains keyword links and a call to action, submit it to various online resources, and make any changes they request (EzineArticles.com is particularly picky). Whew! All that for 2 links.

But wait, what if you could write one article, get many variations of it, and get 100 links from relevant sites, instead of only 2? A couple of months ago I wrote an article about SEO LinkVine as a fast, easy and effective method to get inbound links to your site. The site closed its membership shortly after that, but since it’s now open for awhile, I decided to give you an update of my experience with article marketing through them, using spinnable articles.

There are two areas of SEO LinkVine, and I’ll discuss each of them in turn.

Submit Articles and Get Links

This is my favorite part of the service. Yes, you still have to take all the steps listed above, along with the additional step of spinning the article (click the link <– to learn how that’s done). The site has an article spinning function; the last time I checked it didn’t do as good a job as I liked, but I’m very picky, and the spinner on the site is a good way to start out.

Here’s the best part – you choose the categories your article fits in, decide how many times a day it’s available for publishing (I usually choose 2 or 3) and sit back while others post your article to their sites, complete with keyword links that point back to your website. I have found this method to be very effective at building inbound links from relevant sites, and is alone worth the monthly membership fee.

Get Free Content

I’ve had mixed results with this portion of the service. I have several sites listed, but rather than have articles post to them automatically, I review each one. Thank goodness I chose that option from the beginning, because I reject 80-90% of the articles submitted for my sites. Reasons include the articles not being a good fit with the blog topic and/or poor writing (or spinning) ability.

That said, I’ve also received some truly excellent articles that I’ve been happy to publish on my sites. (Let me be clear here – SEO Diva is always written by me or a guest author.) It takes only a few minutes to scan those awaiting approval, and the gems are worth the time spent rejecting the other articles.

Articles on Demand Feature

I haven’t utilized this feature as much as I should. Here’s how it works:

The brand new “articles on demand” feature allows you to add to your existing blog content by telling the SEOLV members the exact articles you would like written. It’s like having your own personal team of article writers at your service, at no cost.

To get started, simply select the blog you would like the article added to. Next, select the category you would like your article assigned to. Next, write in a short explanation of the article you would like written. And finally, write a more detailed description of the article to make sure the article writer knows specifically what to write about. Click the “Request Topic” button and you’re done!

As soon as an article writer selects your topic, writes the article, and submits it, it will be sent directly to you for approval (or if you’ve set your blog to auto-accept, it will be automatically added to your blog).

The few times I’ve requested articles I’ve been happy with them, especially since they’ve improved the process. I learned more specific you are, the better the results.

Conclusion

With many sites to build inbound links for, SEO LinkVine is well worth the expense to me. If nothing else, you may want to consider registering for the free Get Free Content. But if you’re working to build inbound links, you should take a look at what they have to offer. It’s one more tool to get your site ranking well in Google search results…which means more traffic and better conversions.

The answer is Both.

If you have a valuable comment to make on a relevant blog, then hey, more power to you! Comments like that may get you a link, and they can also bring traffic to your site.

However, it amazes me that the people who leave comments like the ones below think they will gain anything by these. After all, who doesn’t have the Akismet plugin on their blog, which catches spam comments like these in the filter all day long.

• haha,The Subject of your blog is very Suit to me, I hope more interflow with you this Burden.
• Than it of the pillars of the community. A landlord in the community of tomorrow will be better!
• thanks i really love your blog. this is great knowledge. I wanted to let you know about some killer traffic video courses i have. just swing by and take advantage of my save the family vacation firesale. right now.
• That you post to the resurgence of my heart, you saved me a pull pull cool cool heart!
• dBNfYx slzrggbyxynx
• I like the layout of your blog and I’m going to do the same thing for mine. Do you have any tips? Please PM ME on yahoo @ AmandaLovesYou
• You are so brilliant and your blog posts amaze me! I an stunned when I read them. (Well, those may be for real – I get a lot of them!)

They have reopened the “Get More Traffic” portion of the site for a short time, as they have a large number of blogs available after the contest they recently held.

These blogs all need more content, and they are willing to publish your content along with keyword links back to your site.

SLV will close again, so if you’re interested don’t wait too long.

How does it work?

There’s a video on the site you can watch, but here’s the simplified process:

1. Write an original article about your product

2. Paste it into their content spinner.

3. Use their spinner to change the article so syndicated articles will be different.

4. Add your keyword links.

5. Decide how many links you want to build daily. This is the number of blogs / sites that will be allowed to republish your article on a daily basis.

6. Choose your categories.

7. Publish

How do I do it?

My process is pretty much the same, except I want my spun articles to have a higher originality content than SEOLinkVine is currently able to provide. So I use Magic Article Rewriter, where I can get a 40-45% originality ratio, which is reflected on SLV as 80-95%.

To learn how it works, see my article on link building with Magic Article Rewriter.

Caveat: Garbage in, garbage out. If you want to have articles online that you are proud of and that sounds professional, take your time with the spinning portion. Make sure all the iterations make sense and don’t read like English is your second language. There’s a learning curve, but there usually is with anything that is worthwhile. My copywriters get pretty good after the first two or three articles, and my acceptance rate on SLV is 100% on almost every article.

Where do the articles go?

SEOLinkVine does not provide you with a list, but I’ve found my articles on a variety of relevant sites. Some are new sites, others are sites that have been around for awhile and have PR.

Is it White Hat and does it work?

Yes, this is White Hat SEO. I’m sure some people don’t much care about the quality of the articles they write or publish, but my articles are well written and informative, and the articles I choose to publish are the same.

I’m seeing increased search engine rankings for my keywords, as well as inbound traffic from the sites publishing the articles.

This is certainly not the only way I build links, but it is a way to build a large number of inbound links over time.

Article marketing is a great way to build links to your site, but it can be a tedious process to come up with a volume of unique articles.

Enter a fast and relatively easy way to build a lot of links quickly with article marketing.

Build Links to Your Site Quickly

I am a total fan of Alex Krulik’s Magic Article Rewriter and Magic Article Submitter. I’ve been using both for over a week, building links to my sites like mad! Here’s how they work…

Magic Article Rewriter is a dream to use, especially with the added Magic Tokens database, which automates almost the entire process. You just paste an article into the text box, click on Magic Tokens, and you’ve got an article ready to be spun and distributed. The spun articles are not garbage…they make sense, although I do go through and make corrections, since sometimes the synonyms or replacement phrases don’t quite fit the article.

This is the above paragraph with tokens added, which can be spun into many different versions:

Magic Article Rewriter is a {dream|delight|joy|pleasure|marvel} to {use|utilize|make use of}, {especially|particularly} with the {added|supplementary|additional} Magic Tokens database, {which|that} automates {almost|virtually|nearly} {the entire|the whole|the complete} {process|procedure}. You {just|simply} {paste|insert} an article into the text {box|area}, click on Magic Tokens, and you’ve got {an article|a piece of writing} {ready to|able to|able to} be spun and distributed. The spun articles {are not|aren’t} {garbage|trash|rubbish|nonsense|gobbledygook}…{they|the articles} make sense, {although|though} I do go {through|thru} {and|plus} {make|create} {corrections|changes}, {since|because|as} {sometimes|typically|generally} the synonyms or {replacement|substitute|alternate} phrases {don’t|do not} {quite|entirely|totally} {fit|match} the {article|piece}.

Submit Your Articles to Hundreds of Directories

The companion software to this is Magic Article Submitter. You create a Gmail account specifically for your article submissions, then create a profile for the article directories within the Submitter. It automagically signs you up with up to 700 article directories, and then goes into the Gmail account and activates the accounts (I love that part!). Next, using the wizard, you enter your article into the Submitter, complete with tokens, choose your categories, and it then submits spun articles to the article directories.

The number of directories your articles are actually submitted to depends upon your subject matter and the categories. There’s no point in submitting an article on dog training to a wine article site. Before you ask – I don’t worry about getting too many links at one time. Not all the articles will be accepted, and some will take weeks to get accepted. Some will be filtered out by Google, and that’s okay.

For a much better and more complete explanation of these Elite Article Marketing Tools, click on over to Alex’s site and watch his videos. He’s a great guy, and has taken the time to respond to a couple of issues I had.

After raving about these software programs, I want you to know that this is not a paid article! I just think they are great products and I’m sold on them. I do have an affiliate relationship, but I never promote products unless I have used them and believe they are beneficial to your SEO campaign.

Press releases have been used for decades by the public relations industry to make announcements and acquire media attention for their clients. Today, press releases have begun to be used in other ways, including as part of online marketing efforts.

Below are some tips to help you optimize and write effective press releases for your marketing methods.

Choose a Newsworthy Topic

One of the biggest mistakes people make when writing press releases is not making them something anyone would be compelled to read. Your web site’s launch is of little importance to the world at large unless you can show that you are offering a valuable and necessary service.

For example, if you were starting an online IT recruiting web site, your newsworthy angle might be the large number of vacancies in certain industries which are being left unfilled. Then people would take an interest in how you can help solve that problem.

Writing a Press Release

Treat the content just as you would any article in terms of keywords. Pick some that are relevant and are frequently used in searches. Add them strategically to your press release, particularly in the headline, summary, and several times in the body.

Do not overuse the keywords because these will make the PR seem too spam-like and may make it seem less than professional.

Use Clear Language

Another mistake that is easily made is writing the press release for a specific instead of a general audience. That means you don’t want to rely too heavily on industry jargon in your content. Readers are usually turned off by jargon not only because it can be challenging to understand but also because it can generate a negative impression of your site or your business.

Add an Image and Quote Someone

To make it more interesting, professionals recommend you add an image, if appropriate, to your press release. It’s also a good idea to insert a quote somewhere in the article. This will make it seem more professional and add authenticity.

Create Keyword Anchor Links

Because the goal of the press release you are writing is to drive people back to your web site, you’ve got to make it as easy as possible for that to happen. One way to accomplish that is by adding anchor links to your text. These are links back to pages of your web site embedded into the text through your keywords.

Link back to appropriate pages on your site, not just your home page. These links can become a valuable asset in your web site’s link inventory.

Follow Online Formatting Guidelines

If you’re going to be distributing your press releases through online services, you need to be aware of the format that is required by those services. The most common format requires the press release to be between 300 and 500 words in length, to have a headline, a summary, body content, an about the company section, and contact information.

You can find press release samples on the Internet fairly easily or you can hire a ghostwriter to prepare them for you.

The service I frequently use for press releases is PR Web. The cost of a press release, including the SEO Visibility option, is $200. There are also several free services online.

Hosted web content (aka pre-sell pages) is a linking opportunity that many people are not aware of.

What is Hosted Web Content?

Hosted web content is a page on another web site that includes links back to your web site. In some cases, this will consist of a page of content within the site with links to deep pages of your site. Sometimes it’s a review of your site with a link back.

The difficult part is finding relevant sites that will host your content. There are paid services that offer nice pre-sell pages that include several paragraphs of content with embedded links back to your site.

These can often do great things for your rankings if the web content’s home site is a trusted, reputable site. Also make sure the title, description, etc. have been optimized for search engines.

Risks of Hosted Web Content

Google does not approve of web site managers purchasing links to their sites. However, when hosted content pages are done well they are not obvious examples of paid links, so they provide a reasonable option for sites that want to gain more inbound links faster.

If Google does recognize that you’ve paid for this hosted web content, you won’t be banned from the results. The links just won’t count towards increasing your ranking. Your risk is higher if you’re using a free service.

Other Issues to be Aware Of

If you’re interested in hosted web content, make sure you shop around. Some of these services can be quite expensive: as much as $500 per month. If you allow the service to write the content for your page themselves, they own it and can remove your links if you stop paying.

You also don’t want a lot of other advertising on your hosted page, which is common with free services. Other ads can distract people from following your links and may alert Google that you have paid for your links.

One service you may want to try out is Linkworth. The last time I checked their prices were pretty reasonable and they include a lot of different link building options.

The rest of us trudge along, building back links slowly and carefully, keeping them natural looking and raising no alarms. You can, of course, get involved in a link farm or a three-way link exchange, or buy a thousand links for $100 from an outsourcing firm, but those typically get found out by Google sooner or later, and then the Google smack-down happens and you have to start all over.

Gyutae Park at Winning the Web has a very good article on building quality links for your site. Since he has said it as well as or better than I could, and I’m busy getting ready for Christmas (just like you) take 5 minutes and head over to read his suggestions: The Secret to Making Every Link Count For Your SEO Rankings.

Happy Holidays to all my readers – I hope yours are warm and filled with love.

The big directories, like Yahoo, Business.com, and even BOTW, are pretty expensive for most of us. Check out Search Engine People’s Top 25 Most Powerful Web Directories List that features sites that are cheaper but still pack a punch when it comes to your site’s search engine rankings.

Debra Mastaler writes about performing market research prior to inbound link building in her article Get in Touch With Your Inner Link Self:

…your keyword lists don’t tell you about people’s loyalties or personal preferences which is what you need to know before engaging in the more promotional link building.

Her article may give you some new ideas on what the people who are likely to buy your products or services are looking for, and how they search for it.

Don’t assume your customers think like you do, or search like you do because they DON’T.

Just about everybody buys links. Honest.

If you can afford to be “pure” and “holistic” (actual words used in conversation at a conference lunch table) in your link building, hurrah for you, but most web site businesses can’t afford to be so pure.

It typically takes YEARS to build up enough freely given links to amount to anything close to what competitors can amass in a number of months via paid links, all the while looking “natural” or at least “natural-enough” in the eyes of Google.

Aaron Wall talks about the value of paid links in his blog article How Much is a Link Worth (to YOUR Business):

Some of my friends have affiliate sites that do anywhere from 0 to 10 leads a day at ~ $30/lead. They rank well enough to get good traffic, then their rankings slip. And they keep bouncing back and forth. Buying just a couple strong links could take a $150/day average earnings and boost it to $300…thus yielding a monthly return of $4,500.

As Aaron explains, even a couple of high ranking links can give a huge boost to your rankings. I don’t know about you, but not one really high ranking site has offered me a free, followed link lately. I promise you, buying a link or two is not the equivalent of selling your soul to the devil. It’s called…marketing.

Disclosure: SEO Diva doesn’t have any paid links – for real. It’s not meant to be a money-making blog, and although I’m always up for more readers, I spend my money elsewhere.

Bring the comments on – this should be interesting!

You’ll also find listings of the best directories. My list would be a little different in order of “top tier” etc. but that’s personal preference. One of my favorite directories is Best of the Web. In fact, you can get a special BOTW 20% discount promo code for the month of October.

There are free, vertical, and blog directories listed as well as the standard paid directories. In addition, there are a couple of good niche directory lists included that I was unaware of. These are well worth spending some time finding directories relevant your business niche.

All in all, this is a great resource for building back links with directories!