Reference: 

The SEO Smart Links plugin is extremely easy to install and use. Most of what makes this plugin desirable is the fact that once you’ve activated it you usually can just sit back and let the plugin do the rest.

This plugin is by no means an all-in-one SEO plugin and really serves only adds a little to your site’s SEO strength… at best. However, it’s so easy to use that it’s hard to say no to.

What it does

The plugin merely identifies keywords by matching relevant and repetitive terms throughout your website. Obviously, this would mean it benefits larger websites with more information in a much more powerful way than smaller website, though I would not discourage small websites from using the plugin.

After activating you’ll notice posts and pages that are created after that point to contain links within the text – the links usually hook to categories and tags from what I’ve observed.

Perhaps my favorite feature that the plugin allows is for the links to be placed in Comments, which is of particular value for websites with a high volume of comments.

Critique

Without real clarity to how the plugin works users may find themselves a little frustrated at times by the plugins choice for links. This is probably expected to some degree, though added clarity to the algorithm (perhaps even a little control) could allow users to structure material in a way to take full advantage of the plugins capability.

Paid Version

There is a paid version of the plugin that adds some more functionality, though it’s not cheap. For a single website license you’ll be set back $79.

Reference: Plugin-Reviews.com

The SEO Quake plugin is a free plugin for the Google Chrome web browser.

The plugin is not designed for casual users so much, but rather those who continually do SEO research likely for a large number of websites and/or clients. The plugin is clearly not intended to be a one-stop-shop for all your SEO needs and what it does seek to achieve it does very effectively.

Like all of Google Chrome plugins the install process is so simple (one-click & give permission) that its not worth discussing past this sentence.

Top Bar

The first thing you’ll notice upon completion of the install is a top bar that appears when you visit websites. This bar provides some basic SEO ranking information from a variety of the leading sources: Google PageRank, SEMrush, Alexa Rank, Facebook Likes, Internal & External links, and a bit more, but those are main ones worth mentioning.

Search Engine Query Bars

The second place you’ll notice the SEO Quake bar is when you do a search on just about any search engine. The information displayed in the top bar will display under every search query. This unfortunately makes the bag a lot larger and a bit less pleasant to look at. If you don’t want to look at it you can easily swing over to the Preferences section and turn it off for that search engine.

No-follow Links

Another great feature you’ll begin to notice right away is that all No-follow links are given a strikethrough. This gives you a heads up of the value of backlinks on a site.

Preferences

The preferences section is well built, intuitive and easy to use (no bugs that I could find). Quickly and easily turn on or off any features you like or dislike to see.

I could go into more step-by-step instructions and explain what the changes in Preferences will achieve, but there’s no real need to – this one is pretty dang simple.

Note: I have not reviewed this plugin in Mozilla Firefox yet, though you can also download it there.

301 Redirects are a way of fixing this problem – they allow the user to transfer users who arrive at the broken or former link to a new URL address.

It does not take many brain cells to understand why this is important to SEO. Often Search Engines will attribute a value to a page based off its performance with users and its age on the internet, such as Google’s PageRank. If the page is then deleted search engines will quickly find out and remove the value of that link that had often taken a long span of time to accumulate.

Instead of losing that value of the URL you can redirect it to a similar page or the new URL address for that page to maintain its value and ranking on search engines. Note that if the page is too dramatically different the search engines will recognize and may assign a penalty to the pages value still.

<div><ul><li><a>Menu item</a></li></ul></div>

Nothing special, but good for organization.

If you understand the basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standards then you know that search engines love Header Tags. Header tags are those HTML tags that rank 1 – 6, the lowest being the most significant… and yes, there are only 6 available with no rumors of more in the future (that I’m aware of).

<h1><h2><h3><h4><h5><h6>

For most of the sites I build in WordPress I like to insert <h2> or <h3> around every list item in my navigation menu. To do that it’s pretty easy, though assuming you didn’t design your theme you’ll have to track down where your nav menu is called. If it’s at the top of your website, then it may be in the header.php, but if it’s on the side then you may find it in your sidebar.php. Regardless, navigating through theme files is a whole different topic and depending on who designed it that could be extremely easy or a bit of work.

If there is no additional code then added by the theme designer (often isn’t) then your code will look like the following:

<?php wp_nav_menu(array('menu' => 'Menu Name')); ?>

Note that ‘Menu Name’ is definitely going to be different. Also, some themes call a category listing instead of a menu, which can make adding menu items easier for beginner users – this is extremely limiting and not recommended. There are a few different category list calls, but typically the code will look similar to the one above, only replace wp_nav_menu with wp_list_categories or something like that. If that’s the case you can go through a process of replacing the category list with the nav menu, though after you do so you will also need to (1) declare the nav menu in your functions.php and then call it forward in your WordPress admin back-end area (Appearance / Menus).

To add the header tags you’ll want to add two new lines inside the array(), which will look like the following when completed:

<?php wp_nav_menu(array('menu' => 'Menu Name', 'before' => '<h2>', 'after' = '</h2>')); ?>

If your site is new you won’t notice much change, but if it’s been around then you should notice some significant recognition changes from Google and other search engines. You can monitor this change very easily with Google Webmaster Tools.

Long Answer

Backlinks exist for the mere purpose of fighting dishonesty. If everyone was honest then search engines would trust what everyone said about their own website, but since everyone is not honest (and in the area of business often less-so) search engines decided it was wisest to see what everyone else said about a website.

So there is a sort of two-sided coin here: (1) Make sure your website says the right things about itself and (2) make sure a lot of other websites agree with it. If those two match up then you’ll likely do well.

Backlinking is not as easy as it sounds

So I just go put some links on another website… where exactly do I start?

There are a few ways to go about here. Generally, there are 4 different website categories for backlinking:

1. Search Engine Directories (Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local)
2. Business Directories (yellow pages, DMOZ, Manta, HotFrog, and tons more)
3. Blog Comment sections
4. Forum Discussions
5. Do-Follow Advertising spots / Link Exchanging

Generally speaking the 5th is not as easy to find. Advertising is usually set up as “No-Follow” and Link Exchanging is usually done by the desperate (those who need you more than you need them).

Search Engine Directories

These do not actually help you as far as backlinking, but they do help you get on the front page if you do it right. How does this work? Search Engine Directories require you to submit business addresses (usually require to be verified by snail mail, so you’ll need a mailing address). Then they rank according to location, and other things can help a lot too – keywords, lots of reviews (positive ones being a plus of course).

Business Directories

These are great. They count as backlinks in most cases, give you great description areas to load with your business’ keywords, and can be found on both search engines and their own websites. If you don’t want to do it yourself then you can hire an SEO company or register with a business directory listing site, such as Universal Business Listing.

Blog Comments & Forum Discussions

I don’t have a list for you here simply because it varies too much from one industry to the next. My recommendation is to locate your keywords and then do a Google search. Make a list of the top URLs or Domains that come up. Then enter those each individually into Majestic SEO (you’ll have to create an account). This will show you your competitors top Referring sites and where they’re getting the most backlinks from. You can then go and get backlinks their yourself, though I can’t guarantee they are all free.

Quick answer, Important!

Long Answer

Search Engines look for images when they search for relevant data. Most people are visual learners and the internet is predominantly a visual medium.

There are certainly exceptions to this rule, i.e. Craigslist. Regardless, images will greatly compliment and enhance any site. Alt tags are simply a way of making those images more searchable and friendly.

Warning: Do not load tons of irrelevant keywords to your alt tags – their purpose is to verbalize what the picture illustrates. The “WordPress” logo to the right can help illustrate this. In the alt tag I put “WordPress – Powerful CMS with Built SEO Functionality,” which is all completely true and relevant to my website’s purpose as well as to WordPress’ purpose.

Note the underline of “as well.” relevance is really when two websites have common ground. So in your images make sure the alt tags are named in such a way that highlight that common ground.

If not there will likely be no immediate affect, but search engine’s specialize in eliminating irrelevance.

Regardless, a longer keyword phrase is a sure fire way to optimize for a phrase with less competition (assuming you did the research to make sure). I usually have to come up with these randomly or with tons of thought as they are seldom intuitive and often not provided automatically when Google’s Keyword Tool provides you with leads.

Though, every once in a while I stumble upon one completely on accident. Today’s is a funny one as it’s really just a joke I’m running with from memebase.com and their inventory of inside jokes. I used one of their characters, which I call the “Why-U-No-guy”, but I’m sure they have a far more specific name for him – I’ve used him to emphasize my frustration with various internet frustrations.

Anyway, I checked my Webmaster tools with an odd surprise…

Photos Make Blogs Look Pro

As a rule of thumb I knew that professional blogs literally ALWAYS have a picture in their blog posts – these are often at the top of their blog so that it is one of the first things that people see. Ideally the picture symbolize the website’s theme in some fashion and also the topic of the blog post.

Despite the purpose I still frequently see images that are entirely irrelevant to the blog post, but are placed due to the rule of ‘always’ placing them in a blog post.

Is Placing a Picture in ‘ALL’ your Blogs Worth the Time?

The short answer: Yes, and it doesn’t take much time.

If your blog serves a purpose where you either want more viewers, more feedback, or possibly some financial conversion objective on your site, then you should always aim for top quality.

1. A nice picture, even if not 100% relevant, creates a more professional appearance.
2. Pictures are weighted nicely by the Search Engines, just don’t forget your alt=”" tag command and put a good keyword in it.
3. The image editing software you need is free – you can do basic editing with Microsoft Paint.
4. Camera’s these days are extremely inexpensive in relation to good quality.
5. If you don’t have time to take pictures there are lots of great free and paid sites for downloading high quality picture.

Tools for Higher Quality Pictures

Let’s say you already know all this or are convinced, but don’t have the time or money to spend on high quality photos. There are inexpensive stock sites available and there are also free stock sites. Since there are tons of stock sites that have paid options I’m not going to focus on that – you’ve probably already seen plenty of their advertisements.

For a great free solution to stock photos check out MorgueFile.com

Things To Avoid

Although my recommendation is to include photos in your blogs even if they are not 100% relevant that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try for relevancy. It can look pretty tacky when you see a list of recent blogs and none of the pictures have much relevancy.

Do NOT use low quality photos. Low quality photos will likely never help your site and can possibly hurt your site by turning viewers away. If all you have is a low quality photo then just don’t use it or perhaps keep the blog as a draft until you have a high quality photo to attach.

Related Article

“How Important are Image Alt Tags”

In-House SEO Pros

The pros of keeping SEO in-house are really reliant on your company structure. The size of the company is somewhat irrelevant as I’ve observed both small and large companies in great need of in-house SEO… conversely I’ve seen the opposite as well.

In-House SEO Cons

My time in SEO has convinced me that SEO continues to remain a relatively simple concept and an easy field to work in. The only complications occur when manipulation is included in the strategy, which can have some short term results and often long-term falls.

Cost. Few companies I’ve come across hire an employee to take control of their SEO, unless of course the company is directly involved in SEO. For most companies it is a waste of time to hire a single employee, pay his benefits, pay his salary, and end up with a worker that has a lot of free time after a few months have gone by. In other words, in most cases it is far less expensive for most companies to simply hire an SEO team to take over their SEO strategy.

Time & Change. The SEO field is ever evolving. I personally get e-mails from Google almost weekly about new or upcoming changes. These changes can be slight or extreme. Fighting to stay up with all the SEO changes is really not that difficult, but rather it is time consuming.

Experience. Finally, a team often will have far more experience and knowledge to bring to the table than a single individual. Sure the individual knows your company better, but there are often many details that can be learned in other companies and markets that give great insight into others. The strength of an individual in a company is hard to compare to that of an entire team that is focused on SEO work exclusively, though that does assume your company does not have a team of its own.

What are Google Sitelinks?

This ad is nothing I fabricated for example, but a straight cut and paste from their e-mail.

It is easy to see in the red circled area where the Sitelinks are and how they have a fancy built-in hyphen separator, forgive the sarcasm, it actually is nice that it’s there.

Sitelinks are great for three reasons:

1. Sitelinks are more room for keywords to catch your audience, though keep in mind that they still have a no-follow attribute and won’t be worth any real ‘Link Juice.’
2. Sitelinks can help those clicking on your ad to go straight to what they want… if not, they run the risk of landing on your home page and getting frustrated in their search. Take note, if you have some Conversion Goals with Funnels attached in Google Analytics this will ruin your tracking – it’s still worth using, just take note of that and add some more relevant Funnels.
3. Finally, Sitelinks can help you eliminate visitors who click on your ad thinking it’s about something it isn’t because they didn’t read the black text description. The nice highlighted blue on the Sitelinks is one more thing that makes the ads… well, maybe 5% more dummy proof at best. Not sure what the statistic is and I hope it’s obvious I completely invented that one, but I’ll take improvement however small.

Ok, You’ve Convinced Me – How to I put Sitelinks on my Ads?