This week we will be looking at our top 5 natural link building techniques that may lead to an improvement in your organic search positions.

Natural link building is vital for long term success with your SEO campaigns, Our top 5 tips are:

1) Existing Brand Link Adjustment – As mentioned in a previous video blog, review the existing links to your clients site and check the landing page and anchor text supports your SEO campaign.

2) Guest Blogging – Approaching webmaster or blog owner in your clients industry to request that you would like to publish an article on their blog, including of course a link back to your clients website.

3) Target industry related websites that get updated regularly and aren’t crammed with Ads. Approach the webmasters and request a banner or text link advert. Aim for a free ad to start with, then reciprocal if needed and if they are savvy maybe a paid agreement IF the site is of a high equity. See our link equity video.

4) Say something interesting via your blog – Quality content can drive traffic and encourage others to link, tweet, like and any other social bookmark tag, helping your post build authority.

5.) Create something worth watching – Video SEO is extremely popular and with the increasing success of youtube, video can play a part in your organic success. Create a viral video to link bate and encourage social bookmarking. See the SEO song.

Thanks for watching, please add any other techniques you feel are important to the comments on our supporting blog post.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, We are going to return to canonicalisation and how to correctly implement the canonical link element.

The principle behind canonicalisation link elements is to normalise your URL’s, this then helps search engines decide which of your pages is the authority for a particular piece of information and also allows Google to direct any link juice to the correct URL helping you search engine positions.

These can be important for content management systems and eCommerce website that generate identical pages with different URL’s. We have previously done a more in depth video on canonicalisation and webmaster tools blog also have an excellent video with Matt Cutts from Google explaining the principles, both of these are linked from the supporting blog post.

We have created a simple piece of php code which allows your to canonicalise your website quickly and easily, this weeks tutorial will show the installation and you can get the code from the blog post.

The implementation on this dynamic canonical link element is for php apache servers, it will allow you to tell Google which page is the authority for the content displayed.

The code does this in 2 ways, firstly It shows the full domain ie. www.domain.co.uk, so you have no issue with Google treating domain.co.uk as the primary source of content. You can also specify this in webmaster tools or use a .htaccess file to re-direct.

Secondly, if you have folder on your server,  for example /downloads/canonical/ and you want this folder to be classed as the authority, you can use the code supplied.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.seo-creare.co.uk<?php echo str_replace(“index.php”, “”, preg_replace(“/\?[\w&\-\_\=]+/”,”",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));?>” />

I have set an example on creare communications.

so we can see i have added the code to the header in my index.php file. Now when I upload the file and view the source of the index.php page, it displays within the canonical link element the URL /downloads/canonical/ and not /downloads/canonical/index.php, This means if Google finds this page it will automatically know that I want the origin of the pages content to lie with / and not index.php

We hope this helps you inform Google of your primary content and exclude any duplicate content issues, along with that it will help natural back links that are currently linked to the wrong URL to be re-directed to the canonical URL.

Thanks for watching if you have any questions or comment please leave them on the Youtube channel or supporting blog post.

http://www.seo-creare.co.uk/downloads/canonical/

Script:

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, The news this week is that Google are threatening to stop censoring its search results in the Chinese Google and possibly stop trading all together. This is partly due to a recent attack on Google mail users, a colleague of mine has recently written an article discussing this further so check that out on the Creare blog.

We thought this week we would take look at the SEO friendly plug-ins currently available for Firefox.

SEO For Firefox - This tool provided by the SEOBook.com is one of the most popular tools available, providing the user with a wide range of information from identifying that a link is follow or no-follow to analysis within search result itself. You can see the in the example, information is shown in the search result. Some popular statistics are Alexa rank, Dmoz listing, Cached date, Twitter, Yahoo Position and various social bookmarks.

Joost de valk - We have mentioned this tool in a previous video blog, the tool essentially details information about backward links and works as an ‘add on’ for Yahoo Site Explorer and Google’s Webmaster Tools. As you can see in the example the anchored text appears along with the Page Rank. The text is colour coded to represent if the link if ‘follow’, ‘nofollow’ or is displayed red if the link isn’t found on the web page shown.

Google Toolbar - This provides you with various tools, the ones that we use on a regular basis are Google page rank and the Highlight feature, the highlight feature highlights the search terms found with in the current web page, from the last Google query. We can see both of these features being used in the example video.

SEopen - An excellent tool that allows an user to quickly find information out about a specific web page. The main features include Yahoo! backlinks, Indexed pages, Google backlinks, cached dates, Pagerank check, Alexa overview and many more.

We have linked to all the Firefox plug-ins on the supporting blog post.

• SEO for Firefox
• SEOpen
• Google Toolbar
• Joost De Valk

Thanks for watching, if you have any questions of comments please leave them on the Youtube channel or blog.