Omar Kattan » Link Building

How Important is Link Building Today

Omar Kattan — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 13:30:27 +0000

The basic components of online marketing, what makes a website popular and how it is listed in the search engines, have not changed much over the past ten years. Generating relevant, high quality, inbound links is as important today as it ever was. The number and nature of sites linking into your website will impact on... Read more..

PageRank Basics

Omar Kattan — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 17:51:55 +0000

PageRank, named after Google's co-founder, Larry Page, is Google's proprietary system for ranking every site that appears within its index. This is a guide to understanding the basics of PagRank and how it affects your site's organic (SEO) traffic. Nearly every site within the visible web has a PageRank. The exceptions are spam sites and very new sites. As an example, Google ranks at 10 (out of 10, at the time of this publication) while the BBC ranks 9 out of 10, which are very high numbers within the PageRank world. What is PageRank Read more..

Blogger Outreach Programme – Planning & Execution

Omar Kattan — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:53:03 +0000

Blogger Outreach is the process of connecting with bloggers for the purpose of promoting a brand and increasing it's visibility to a niche audience. There are also SEO benefits from a well executed blogger outreach programme. These lie primarily in the fact that when bloggers talk about your brand, they will most likely link to it. These valuable links from trusted relevant sources improve the authority level of the site and reflect positively on the rankings. Read more..

Linking to Press Releases

Omar Kattan — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:28:48 +0000

If your brand is mentioned on the web its very natural to want to tell your users about it. However doing so by linking to the stories that link to you might devalue these links that you've worked so hard to acquire. In the video below, Matt Cutts sets the record straight on linking to press releases and b... Read more..

Top 10 Directories

Omar Kattan — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:55:58 +0000

Once upon a time, Directories were the backbone of the internet. Actually, Yahoo started it's life out as a small human edited directory attempting to organise the millions of websites out their into logical categories. Then Google came along! Another prominent directory on the net is DMOZ aka the Open Directory Project (ODP) is an open source initiative hailing itself as the largest Human edited Directory on the Net. The Read more..

Outbound Links, Nofollows & Link Juice Dilution

Omar Kattan — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:09:24 +0000

One of the SEO arguments out there is the detrimental effect of outbound links on "link juice" and PageRank dilution. While not completely inaccurate this is somewhat of a myth that requires further explaination.

LinkBaiting Process – The Guardian Example

Omar Kattan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:46:51 +0000

Link baiting is a powerful strategy to build one way links from relevant sites and improve a site's overall popularity. How do you go about baiting links? Here are a few steps to follow in order to conduct a powerful linkbait campaign.

Arrange a brainstorm session that includes various people from your organisation including marketing, IT, creative agency reps and last but not least, your SEO.

List the various categories within the target audience of your website. An example of this could be You... Read more..

Link Building Strategies

Omar Kattan — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:16:52 +0000

Link building is probably the most frustrating part of SEO. How do you build links to your website if you do not have the time or the inclination to do so. This post will explore a few techniques that will allow you to achieve one way links to your site without having to spend time or money doing so.

It is a well known fact that the quantity and quality of links to a website are a major factor in determining if and where a site ranks for a specific search query. The more competitive the keyword pharse the more difficult it is to rank unless you h... Read more..

Article Syndication for Link Building – Best Practices

Omar Kattan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:23:06 +0000

Do you use article syndication as part of your link building strategy? Matt Cutts from Google supports this form of search engine marketing as a legitimate technique to boost your ranking efforts as long as search engines know that your website is the original source of the content. View the full interview here.

[youtube niINTKXT-zs]

In order to get the most out of your article syndication strategy, follow the following general guidelines:

Make sure that your article adds value to the internet... Read more..

Managing your Link Juice with “NoFollow”

Omar Kattan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:28:13 +0000

"Link Juice" is the cumulative effect of the link popularity that your site gains over time as more and more sites link to yours. If not managed properly, this link juice can be diluted unnecessarily within your site's internal pages. So how do you go ab... Read more..

Link Building Through Article Distribution

Omar Kattan — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:00:08 +0000

If you're a good writer then a good strategy for increasing your website's link popularity is to distribute your articles to article syndication sites. If you have the time however, its better to write unique article and place them on unique site as discussed in this post about a reciprocal linking strategy that works, this is important because links located in duplicate articles may be devalued by search engines. One of the sites that has recentl... Read more..

A Reciprocal Link Building Strategy that Works

Omar Kattan — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:06:34 +0000

If you're stuggling to gain links pointing to your website then you might want to try this technique.

Email the owner of a site that is similar to yours in content and ask them for a reciprocal link but here's the trick, instead of asking them for a straight reciproacal link (ie I link to yours from my links page and you link to mine from your links page), find an intersting piece of content on their site and tell them that you will link to it from your site in exchange, ask them to do the same for you.

Make sure to ensure that the... Read more..

Purchasing Links – A Best Practice Guide

Omar Kattan — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:23:59 +0000

If you're deciding to purchase links to boost your link popularity (I know I know, its against Google's rules, but hey everyone's doing it!) make sure you purchase the links for a long period of time. The longer the better.

There are a few things to consider when purchasing links:

As mentioned above, go for the long haul, the longer the better. This is good from two perspectives; 1) you guarantee that the search engines recognise the link and award you the benefit of it. and 2) you're more likely to negotiate a better... Read more..

The Perfect Inbound Link

Omar Kattan — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:20:48 +0000

To begin lets define what's an inbound link. An inbound link is a link that points to your website from someone else's website, its as simple as that! Another important definition before we get started is Link Popularity: Link Popularity is the measure of how popular your site is from an inbound link perspective; ie how many sites are linking to yours. Now that we got the definitions out of the way, lets discuss the the characteristics of the perfect inbound link... Here are the main things to pay attention to when you analyse the quality of the links pointing to your site: ... Read more..

Strategic Link Building

Omar Kattan — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 10:06:13 +0000

What is strategic Link Building? I define it as the art of acquiring links that will get you ranked above your competitors (all other things being equal).

Lets say you own a widgets site called Widgets4U.com and your competitor owns a competing site called MoreWidg... Read more..

Traditional vs Web 2.0 Link Building

Omar Kattan — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 20:18:27 +0000

Link popularity has a major influence on search engine ranking. After all, Google's algorithm and what distinguished it from its earlier rivals such as Alta Vista, was based on exactly that ... Link Popularity.

Given the importance of Link Popularity, its worthwhile to examine all link building methods and the best way to do that is to split Link Building into 2 sections: Traditional Link Building and Web 2.0 Link Building.

Be... Read more..