Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) Link Specialist

Objective:
To work in an environment where my creativity and resourcefulness can translate into a productive collaboration, to be energized by new challenges, and have more opportunities for growth.

Summary of Qualification:
Four (4) experience in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Link Specialist from keyword research, redeveloping the Website, creating incoming links, submitting to search engines, reporting on its results. (Improving Search Engine Result Ranking: Organically and Sponsored Search in major Search Engines such as: Google, Overture, Yahoo, and MSN), and Knowledge in increasing Link Popularity, Web Ranking, Website Traffic.

Education:
Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BSIT)
Major in Computer Programming
Asian College of Science and Technology (ACSAT)
4/f GSP Bldg. Luna, Velez St. Cagayan de Oro City 9000

Skills:
Operating System: Windows 95/98, Windows 2000/ME/XP

Other: Visual Basic 6.0, Visual FoxPro, Visual C++, FoxPro, Java, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, ULEAD Photo Image, CorelDraw, Swish, Macromedia Dream weaver MX 2004, Adobe PageMaker, Flash, FrontPage.

 
Work Experience:

Link Specialist
Gambling related site

-Contacted quality websites typographically related to client site to exchange links by
scanning available site database using custom program developed by the company technical department.
-Categorized each site scanned on the consolidated database.
-Contacted sites that are relevant to client website.
-Maintained a quota on contacting and categorizing sites.

Project Team Leader
Company sites

-Supervised 2 Link Builders and evaluated their performance on a weekly basis.
-Performed planning, leading, and organizing for the team.
-Generated 15th and 30th reports for payroll purposes.
-Motivated team members for optimum work performance.
-Knowledge my team on how to speed up the process.

Link Specialist
Finance related site

-Contacted quality websites typographically related to client site to exchange links by
scanning available site database using custom program developed by the company technical department.
-Categorized each site scanned on the consolidated database.
-Contacted sites that are relevant to client website.
-Maintained a quota on contacting and categorizing sites.

Fulfillment/ Manual Link Inspector
Company website

-Generated reports and gathered necessary data for confirmed reciprocating links
under the Production Department’s link campaign to close projects.
-Evaluated and examine those who already link to us for our repository.
-Maintained open source database, extracted and segregated data by batches for the
-Manual Link Checkers.
-Verify those backlinks coming from Production Department if our link is still there.

Link Builder
Other Company websites

-Manual collecting of prospected sites to link with.
-Visit collected site individually to evaluate which category they belong.
-Contact those categorized sites for link exchange.
-Contacted sites that are relevant to client site.
-Maintained a quota on contacting and categorizing sites.

Others:
Freelancer
Link Specialist
SEO Consultant
Date Entry
Link Builder
Blogger

Basic SEO/Link Building Process

What is SEO?
(Search Engine Optimization) SEO is a process of arranging a web site's content to obtain high rankings in various search engines (both the site and individual pages), and includes tailoring on-page text (such as headlines and subtitles) as well as choosing the proper keywords for a page's meta tags.
SEO also is the techniques used to improve a Web page's results in a search. The altering of a Web site, Web pages and links to Web sites and Web pages to improve visibility, rank and relevance in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.

Why link building is required?
Promotion Ranking is based on the most profound concept for procuring a higher rank at leading search engines especially Google by increasing inbound links to your website. Each quality link from other relevant websites are counted upon as votes to your website.

Link building is extremely time-consuming task that requires lot of research.  Such as:
·    Find the site to link with.
·    Make the link request
·    Wait and follow-up those link requested
·    Managing links

Examine the site to link with, if the said website is “spiderable” and must be no history of blacklisted.

Why links are important?
Major Techniques and methods used in search engines optimization for a website are meta tags placement in website code, alternative tags (alt tags), directories submission which could be free or paid, link building or link popularity services which includes one-way links and link exchanging campaigns to increase the website popularity in search engines.

Why link popularity is important?
Link popularity is important factor for ranking on top in major search engine results. If you are popular in your community search engines will rank you. It means that you should have inbound links from trusted domain on your website topic. One good link is always better than hundred bad links. Good links always bring quality traffic, which can be converting into sale.

What is Pagerank?
Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page.

Page Rank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Why PageRank is important?
While it is argued that PageRank is no longer as important as it once was, it still plays an important part of Google's algorithm that determines where in the search engine results a certain page is displayed for a given query.

A high PR page will usually rank higher in Google's search results, and better results means more organic traffic to your website. You can increase your PageRank by increasing the number of links to your website. Quality links from quality websites with high PR and the same theme as yours influence PageRank the most.

Link Building Processes

Link building
 - Is the process through which one website is advertised in another website dealing with a kin field of interest.

One-Way
 - Are links to your site from sites, which do not receive link from your site.

    One-way links are a vital part of today’s strategies for attaining the best ranking on search engines. One-way links are the most valuable type of links since a lot of experts agree that search engines are starting to discount the value of reciprocal links but they are still important when building your link popularity.

Reciprocal
    - Are arranged when two web sites agree to link to each other. Reciprocal links are also known as "link swaps", "link exchanges" and "link partners".

3-way link
    - Three way linking (siteA -> siteB -> siteC -> siteA) is also a kind of reciprocal linking but a special case. This type of linking is becoming increasingly popular since some search engines are giving less consideration to the value of normal reciprocal links.

Link popularity
-    Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing TO your site FROM other sites on the Web.

Do’s and Don’ts of Link Building

 Do’s

• Concentrate on related and important links only.
• Make sure that your site is listed in all of the major directories.
• Visit Search Engine Guide and search for vertical engines or directories in your focus area.
• Visit Link Popularity Check and search for your competitors. Start visiting the sites that are linked to your      competitors, and write to see if they'll consider linking to your site.
• Visit Link Popularity Check and search for your competitors. Start visiting the sites that are linked to your competitors, and write to see if they'll consider linking to your site.
• Consider what other fields are related to your particular industry and concentrate on getting links from those areas.
• When you visit related sites, look to see if they offer guest books or forums. If they do, post a message, and include your URL in your signature.
• Consider setting up separate theme-oriented domains and link all of your domains together.
• Offer a discount of your goods or services for anyone who agrees to post a small graphic on their site that links back to your site.
• Create a testimonial page, and write a brief testimonial about any Web site that you'd like to get linked to your site. Inform the site of the testimonial, and encourage them to link to the page.
• Write testimonials of particular products, and sign the testimonial with your name and URL. Send the testimonials out to the individual companies, and tell them how much you've enjoyed using their products. Many companies will place testimonials in particular areas of their site, and they're delighted to get rave reviews about their products.
• Offer awards on your site, and give out little graphics that link back to your site.
• Set up an affiliate program, which is an excellent way to boost link popularity.
• Visit the Reciprocal Linkage Topics area of Webmaster World forums and look for new ideas for building link popularity.
• Become a content provider in your focus area, and get your articles posted across the Net in related areas.
• Are there any professional organizations related to your industry? If so, do they have pages of links?
• Develop a plan for boosting link popularity, and then stick to it. Pledge to get so many new links a week, and hire a high school student at minimum wage to work for you, if needed.
• Remember to link to other important, related sites in your industry from your own site. After all, link popularity is both incoming and outgoing, and related, important sites are what you're after.

Dont's

• Don't participate in link exchange programs or link farms. Google will ban sites that participate in link exchange programs, and many of the other major engines have also expressed their dislike of artificially created link popularity.
• Don't use hidden links on your page. Again, many of the major engines frown on the use of hidden links.
• Don't make the mistake of thinking that link popularity isn't important or necessary. A high link popularity is sometimes all it takes to achieve top rankings. It's crucial, in many cases, to the success of an online business.
• If you create separate theme focused sites for the purpose of boosting link popularity, don't use redirects on those sites pointing back to your main site. Rather, create a mini site at the new URL with several pages of good, solid content, and then visibly link back to the main site.
• Don't bother with free-for-all pages. Generally the only thing these pages will guarantee is an increase in email spam if you participate.

Methods of linking

"White hat" method - An SEO technique or method conforms to the search engines' guidelines and/or involves no deception. In other words, it’s the ethical way. The content of the site is easily available to their spiders.

"Black hat" method - A methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception.

–As a general rule, a method that sends a user to a page that was different to the page the search engines ranked is Black hat.

Two most common Black hat tricks are spamdexing and cloaking.

    Content Spam
    •    Hidden text
    •    Keyword stuffing
    •    Meta tag stuffing

    Link Spam
    •    Hidden links
    •    Buying expired domains

Some Black  Hat SEO techniques

·    Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are also called entry pages, jump pages and gateway pages etc. these pages are full of keywords made for the search engine to have high rankings. These don’t give any information to the humans on these pages usually the phrase written “Enter”. As far as search engines are concern they don’t like doorway pages at all. Well you can have these keywords by their proper placement in the content and also in title and Meta tags.

·    Link Farms
The strategy is all about creating sites for ranking purpose. So they can get more back links which will help them in SERPs. These sites don’t have any purpose. Search engines don’t like this as all. Have multiple domain linking to your main websites is good but have the same content or not useful information isn’t good at all according to Google.

·    Identical Content
Don’t use identical content within your sites. Copied content won’t work on search engine. Never make your content by just copying the other websites material. King Search engine Google banned the sites using this strategy.

·    Clocking
Cloaking is a method that allows you to show different pages for human and different ones for search engines. That is also not an ethical way of SEO as major search don’t like these methods. People also use to hide their strategies from SEO firms. The reason is that they actually miss leading the search engine as well as they miss leading the people as well. Search engine can’t reach the actual page Meta tags. Therefore they usually banned these sites.

·    Hidden Text
This strategy is also for adding extra keywords within the website. For that purpose they hide those keywords by coloring them. People can’t see that words but search engine do. When they come to know they kick out the website.

·    Automated software
Don’t use any automated software for the promotion purpose. They don’t really work and sometime they caused for banned a website. Don’t relay on them.

·    Gray hat SEO
Use of black Hat SEO to achieve the white hat SEO results this term is called Grey hat SEO. Black hat SEO is wrong but not that wrong. They online get wrong when we miss use it. Like clocking not well but If we do the proper use and after clocking the page the people get the exact information what they are looking for. That’s only about the negative minded people who feel the search engines as their enemy and use the right techniques in wrong way.

·    Cloaking - mislead a search engine regarding the content of the web page.
            

                   
Link Building Process

One-way Linking Process

here are some ways to get one-way links. There are thousand of sites for any categories of site have. All you have to do is to follow your competitor’s link backs and then approach relevant ones for link request. How you'll find link backs list of your competitors? It’s very simple just use linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorurl.com in yahoo search to find link backs of that site. Then sort a relevant to your site and then make an email request. You should know here that one-way links are many times more effective than reciprocal link building.

Quality And Specific Guidelines
-    Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
-    Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
-    Don't send automated queries to Google.
-    Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
-    Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
-    Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
-    Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
-    If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.
-    Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
-    Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Ways to get one-way links
·    Create a useful, interesting web site so that other sites will naturally link to it.
·    Submit your site to major directories, such as Yahoo! and DMOZ.org, in the appropriate category.
·    Write articles and submit them to newsletters, which are then archived online.
·    Submit brief, useful hints to newsletters for the same reason.
·    Submit articles to article directories.
·    Publish articles on your site and invite other sites to publish them on their sites, with a link to you.
·    Write testimonials
·    Participate helpfully in forums that allow a text link to your site in a signature.
·    Buy ads in newsletters on your topic that are archived online.
·    Locate industry-specific directories and submit your site to them.
·    Create simple web-based free software
·    Create downloadable software, which contains links to your site.
·    Get listed in business directories.
·    Create a blog and get it listed in blog directories.
·    Join business associations, which list their members' sites online.
·    Submit your downloadable software-to-software directories.
·    Use PHP rather than JavaScript to ensure search engines parse your headings and links.
·    Use gimmicks. [Ex: sound play with a mouse over.]

Method
Search engines are getting smart. Reciprocal links are important still, but they don’t get as much points as one-way links anymore. How do you build these one-way links? SEO experts often say, “have great content, great tools, people will link to you automatically.” This sounds a lot easier said than done. Other people will say something like “write great articles and publish them.” Yes, it is a great way to get incoming links and get people to know about your site; however, there are only a few reputable sites.

These are the strategies that can get you one-way links legitimately. It has been used by many webmasters effectively already.

This entry will talk about the two ways One Way Link Strategy
1.    Create one more site with a different web hosting company. This site called “the helper site”.
2.    Build 100+ reciprocal links to the helper site.
3.    Before you start your linking, do the deep linking first to easily crawl your link page of your helper site.
4.    Now you are ready for one-way link exchange. What you do is gather a list of site you want to submit links to.
5.    Create links to all the A Sites on your “helper site”.
6.    Now, write emails to all the webmasters on “A sites” (one email at a time), letting them know that you like their sites and want to do a 3 way link exchange. Tell them that you have put their link at your “helper site”, and ask them if they can link back to your main site. Reverse the email and email all the webmasters on “B sites”.
7.    Now you have seen clearly how to build one-way links to both of your sites. Here is some of my notes about this strategy:
·    Never link from the main site to the helper site
·    This strategy works better if helper site has a PR3+ rating already.
·    The success rate is around 20% depend on how well done your helper site is. If your helper site looks like a link farm, then you won’t get the links.

Alternatives to get one-way links

Visiting competitors site
- A refinement of this strategy is to visit your competitors' sites and the sites you'll find there are potential reciprocal links partners.

Fulfilled links
- A strategy, which you can assure that the site you contacted, is proven and tested
to our previous client’s.

Blog Posting
- Make a blogs comment on same industry blogs. Try to visit http://www.technorati.com/ to search related blogs.

Directory Submission
    - Submit on related directories to archive immediately.

3-way linking
- Make an alternative ways such as 3-way linking and buying links for prior
posting.

Reciprocal Linking Process

Reciprocal link means your website links to another website and that website links back to you. Search engines use link popularity to rank websites. Exchanging reciprocal links with other sites will build a great link directory that will motivate visitors to bookmark your website to get access to your link directory.

One of the factors search engines use to determine your relevancy to a search term is the number of websites linking to your website. This is an effective way to increase your search engine rankings.

Three key success factors for a reciprocal linking strategy are:
1. Quality of links should outweigh quantity
2. Link partners must relate to your site content
3. Partners should link to you from pages listing as few links as possible

Reciprocal linking helps in two ways:

1. They increase your web site traffic, from people who click on the links.

2. Reciprocal links also play a major role in boosting your rankings in    
    search engines.

Quality And Specific Guidelines
·    Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
·    Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
·    Don't send automated queries to Google.
·    Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
·    Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
·    Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
·    Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
·    If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.
·    Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.    

Ways to get reciprocal links

One way to find link partners is to do searches in major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN! To find sites which complement yours but are not direct competitors.

You can also find sites to link exchange by searching for the following phrases in the search engine:
    
"Submit a URL" +"your keyword(s)"   
"Submit an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit Website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit your website" +"your keywords(s)"
"Suggest link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest Website" +"your keyword(s)"

NOTE: Must include the quotation mark to ensure the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases you enter. Also try to replace "Submit a URL" with any of the following search phrases: Add site, add link, add a link, submit URL, submit site, submit link, link exchange or visit the site http://www.inboundlinker.com/.
    

Guidelines on gathering links

In link building campaigns, the golden rule must strictly follow:
§    Always stay out of bad neighborhoods.
§    Obtain links exclusively from relevant sites.
§    Stay out of FFA (Free for All).
§    Don’t join external link exchange programs or link farms.
§    Don’t send a "blanket" email to hundreds of sites asking for a link.
§    Don’t consider links with redirect.
§    Obtain links from pages with specific pagerank as discussed with the client.
§    Only gain links over an extended period of time, so that you don’t get a sudden increase in the number of links to a page.
At Internet Advantage must follow a well-established methodology based on a full understanding of your needs and requirements of client. It is very important that the staff responsible for the link campaign is familiar with their website, their competitors, the market they are aiming at and their core business in order to work efficiently and achieve the most valuable links. However, the best way to build long-term link popularity is to offer good content and features providing real value to your visitors. People will discover your website.

Ways to get your site spiderable

Getting your website indexed by search engines is something you should do in order to make general public know that it does exist. Search engine is the chief ingredient in generating traffic. But before your website appears on the search results you have to make sure that the search engine spiders can find it. This article deals with several ways on how to do it.

Building Links
Many SEOs recommend to build back links from another site that is already indexed rather than submitting your website directly. Sometimes your website can be spidered and indexed very quickly just by submitting it to news releases.

Submitting articles to article directories
This method, your website could get indexed in some big search engines within days.

Forum Posting
If you choose this route make sure that the forums are already listed in search engines because private forums are not always indexed. Associate Programs forum is the one that can help search engine spiders find websites.

Directory Submission
Another old method you can use is by submitting your website to general directories. A free program from linkdirectories.org can help you accomplish this task easily.

Reciprocal linking still work for site indexing and spidering, but theire are some useful service you may consider to join such as Link Metro, link2me,WebReunited etc.. This service only accepts those webmasters who do not hide their link partners.

No matter which method to choose, you should create a sitemap for Google. You can create it easily by going to www.xml-sitemaps.com. Enter your web site address and this site will create an xml file for you. The next step you should take is to go to your Google account and add the sitemap to that account.

This is just a few methods and techniques invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your website traffic will increase.