How To Create A Trackback URL

May 25, 2011 By Lisa Angelettie 309 Comments

How To Create A Trackback URL

For a web writer, links and backlinks are serious business! We love ’em. So today I wanted to discuss with you the value of using trackback url links and how to use them in your blog.

What Is A Trackback?

First of all, it’s important that you understand what a trackback is. A trackback is a method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their articles. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their content. Blogging platforms such as WordPress, Drupal and Movable Type, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published, although WordPress is considered the favored platform for trackback linking. Side Note – Blogger does not support trackback linking.

Let Me Explain Trackbacks In Even Simpler Terms…

If you are cruising around my site and you see an article on creating a custom Facebook url that you want to share with your readers, the obvious thing to do would be to link to that article: http://lisaangelettieblog.com/how-to-create-custom-facebook-url/. Linking to this article from another trackback enabled blog (like another WordPress blog) would automatically create a trackback link.

This type of link that lets me know that you have made reference to my article and it also lets me know in which article on your site you did this – by including a link to that article. At best this gets me interested in you and I will visit your site and read (and possibly refer) to some of your articles as well. We could build a relationship. At worst, you at least have my attention and you have a backlink to your site on my site.

Where Would I Find A Trackback Link?

The way trackback links are displayed can differ based on the type of blogging platform you are using, and even if you are on a WordPress blog, the display can differ based on theme. But for the most part – you will find trackback links in the comment section of your blog or right before the blog comments. This is what a trackback looks like on one of my fav’ sites Problogger:

Please be aware that some blogs show trackback links differently and this is usually dependent upon the preferences you have set up for your blog’s comments. For example, on my site, I just show the link to the referring article. I don’t include the excerpt like Problogger does.

Other sites do enable trackback links but choose not to show them on their site, while others choose not to enable trackback linking at all (which I don’t agree with), but this is probably due to something out there called “trackback spam”.

What Is Trackback Spam?

Well, if you start seeing some trackback links from totally off topic sites or if you get a trackback link from the same site every time you publish – you are probably receiving trackback spam. It’s a good idea to delete those trackback links because they are basically fishing for links all over the web. They aren’t really referring you to any qualified reader that would actually visit your site.

The WordPress plugin Akismet does a really good job of keeping trackback spam at bay, although there are a few other solutions out there such as Simple Trackback Validation that do the same thing as well.

How Concerned Do I Need To Be About Obtaining Trackbacks?

You really cannot force trackback links to your site. They happen organically because someone liked something you wrote on your blog – end of story. So I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Just pay attention when you do get your first few trackback links and see if the blogger would be someone with whom you could build a relationship with in the future.

What you can do purposefully though is refer to relevant articles yourself and build trackback links on other sites. Do this only when you really like the content and preferably on a high traffic blog. The reason why I say high traffic is that most trackback links are NOFOLLOW links, so the advantage of having the link is so that a human being (the blog owner and/or a reader) will see it and click on it. There is no SEO benefit, although there are a handful of blogs that have purposefully turned their trackback links into DOFOLLOW links.

*Bonus Tip – TweetBacks

There is also something called Tweetbacks. That’s when a link pops up in or under your comment section because someone on Twitter has referred to (linked to) one of your articles. This is just another great way to continue the conversation about your content in the social media stratosphere. We like these too!

How To Create A Tweetback

So for instance, if you wanted to recommend this article to your Twitter followers, you would copy the url of the article, shorten it using tinyurl or bi.tly etc., and create a tweet adding that link. Once you do that, a tweetback would automatically appear in my comment section from your Twitter profile.

*This article idea was submitted by a valued reader. Feel free to submit article ideas you’d like me to write about over on my Facebook page.

How To Use Internal Links For Better Search Engine Ranking

April 28, 2011 By Lisa Angelettie 7 Comments

How To Use Internal Links In Your WordPress Blog For Better Rankings

When I seriously began writing articles to attract search engine traffic years ago, I read a lot of search engine optimization (seo) information and followed a lot of the big bloggers online and learned that one of the important factors for getting a bit of Google love is to link to relevant and related information. These links include external links to other sites with related content to the topic of your article and/or your site, but the other links that you should also include are called internal links. These are links to other related articles already on your own blog/site. There are reasons why this works.

First of all it’s important to understand that Google and the other search engines favor articles which offer readers a variety of sources, points of view, and other related supplementary information (all links) inside your blog articles. This is one of the SEO secrets that is part of the formula I use to write and publish articles that Google loves and ranks. You MUST include several links to related articles and/or websites in your articles if you want to give them a fighting chance to rank well in the search engines.

What’s great about creating some of these internal links in your blog, is that for one you give your site a bit of “stickiness” and a better bounce rate. That means that people reading article 1 will be more likely to stay longer and read other articles on your site because you have linked to them. People who stay longer on your site, have more exposure to your message, and are more likely to invest in you.

Now it use to be, a while back, that if you wanted to link to other posts and pages on your WordPress blog that you probably opened another page in your web browser and searched your site for the articles you wanted. Then you would copy and paste those links into the new article you were writing in the other browser window. Personally, I found that a tremendous pain, and it limited my use of internal linking (even though I knew better!).

Now due to one of the many WordPress updates, when you now use the visual editor to create a link, you have the option of entering the full url to the link you want or to search through your existing content and link to that. Here’s how you can do that:

1. As you are writing your article in the visual editor, you can create a link to another post or page on your blog by clicking on the link icon.

2. After you click the link, a box will come up where you can either manually add your link or search your blog for an article post or page to link to.

3. Select your page or post, click “add link” and you’re finished! It’s very fast and easy to do – so there’s really no excuse to start building up your site’s rank by including related internal links to every post you write.

Questions or comments about internal linking? Leave ’em in the comment section.

#1 Google Penalty To Avoid

April 21, 2011 By Lisa Angelettie 1 Comment

#1 Google Penalty To Avoid

There are a few experts out there who would like to scare you to death about depending on Google for search engine traffic to your site. While I don’t recommend depending on only one marketing strategy, I do highly recommend implementing good search engine optimization practices to maximize all the real, organic traffic you can attract to your site. Why?

1. It’s free and that’s always great.

2. It’s typically a highly qualified prospect who finds you via a Google search.

3. It’s simple to implement.

So while I think I have covered a lot of fabulous things about grabbing Google traffic as well as the recent Google algorithm updates that have changed the game for some site owners, I thought it was important to give you another side of the coin. Some of the pitfalls (Google penalties) that you can fall into when writing content for the search engines and how to avoid them.

While I could talk about this topic for days, I selected one major Google penalty that you want to avoid for today’s article, because I see it happening so much. Especially by new marketers or frustrated solopreneurs.

Aggressive Link Building

It is no secret that in today’s society we all are looking for a way to do things faster, better, easier, quicker, etc. This is no different with entrepreneurs on the web. Even with all the lightening fast progress that we’ve seen on the web, people still want faster. Even with the great amounts of money you can make online with minimal effort — people still want to make more money by doing less.

In that spirit, a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to artificially build up the ranking and importance of their sites by acquiring links a.k.a. back links to their sites with lightening speed. Unfortunately, this is probably the #1 way for a site owner to suffer a Google penalty and see your site fall in the oh-so-awful Google sandbox. Why? Well, understand the logic…

Google started assessing a site’s importance based on the number of backlinks it had and the quality of those backlinks years ago. Originally the intent made sense, because if you owned a site which was accruing a regular amount of inbound links from reputable sites – it is thought that your site hosted relevant content to the niche you are ranking in. Thus making you relevant and important as well.

Of course Google didn’t count on the fact that marketers were going to figure out a way to put that process on steroids and get hundreds of links to a brand new website in one day, for multiple days! When they saw that happening, they realized that that wasn’t natural inbound linking. And of course Google was not going to reward sites that did this by giving them great ranking – so they began penalizing sites that did this type of unnatural link building and they still do this to this day.

So please be aware of this major link building blunder as you seek inbound links to your site. Do not build links to your site aggressively. If you did nothing and just allow other sites to find your content and link to you naturally there is absolutely no way you will ever have to worry about this penalty. BUT the sit back and wait method is not something I necessarily recommend, especially for folks looking to see immediate results. So in that case, do not actively and aggressively build links to your site by:

1. Joining a large link farm. The quantity and quality of links from this type of source is dubious and Google will penalize you for it.

2. Buying large amounts of links. Google does not want you to buy any links, but if you do, know that you should buy relevant ones and a few at a time.

3. Publishing hundreds of articles at one time. Many people do this because they’ve bought some sort of submission software as a shortcut, but it’s important that you know that you should not publish hundreds of articles at one time. You should trickle the publishing dates so that you do not have too many new links pointing to your site at one time.

In fact, I recommend that you build new links to your site at a rate of 10-15% or less than your existing link totals per month. For example, if you have a site with 100 current links, that means you can safely build in another 10-20 links without drawing any undue notice. Of course, the larger your site, the more links you can safely build on a monthly basis.

Want more writing for Google tips like this? I’ll be talking about a lot more very soon. Stay tuned! In the meantime, take a look at these related articles:

Why Google Still Matters

Did Google Give Article Marketing A Slap?

Also if you have any questions about writing content for Google, feel free to leave them in the comments section below and I’ll answer them.

Submit Your URL To Search Engines – Quickly!

December 8, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 11 Comments

Submit Your URL To Search Engines

In my last article on how to submit your url to Google – manually, I talked about how to submit your new website or blog to Google without the use of automated software or a service. Manual submissions are easy to do and they do get your sites added to the index — you just can’t totally be sure how quickly they will be added.

That’s why today I want to talk about how to submit your url to search engines (including Google) using a system that will get your websites listed quickly and in many cases in only a few hours!

Let me quickly explain the relationship between the search engines. First, Google as much as many marketers hate to admit it, “rules the roost”. They dominate the search engine marketplace and most if not all of the search engines derive their search engine results based on Google’s results. Now that is not to say that you will not see some search engine result differences between the top 3 – Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You will – but the bottom line is if you submit your site to Google, the other two biggies as well as all the other search engine small fries out there will index your site as well.

Now while I did submit my first url to search engines manually, after that I no longer had to submit to them directly, especially because they really like it if they find your new site on their own. Okay – so how would a search engine like Google find your site if you don’t tell them about it? You LEAD them to it like a horse to water.

If you have a relationship with an established website, one that is indexed and especially one that is updated frequently, you can LEAD Google to your website by getting a backlink on one of these websites.

When Google goes to crawl that website, they will run across the link to your site, recognize that it is “new” and list it in their index.

This is much easier to do then it has been in the past. The real secret is to make sure that you link from a site that permits DoFollow links. The first place to start is if you already have your own website. If you do, you can just link to your new site from your existing site and you should be indexed pretty quickly.

Another great place to submit your url to search engines quickly, is to one of the article directories on my high-ranking DoFollow Article Directory List. Add a link to your new site in the resource box and you should be good to go. Especially if the directory is highly trafficked. Google typically crawls these sites daily.

Before I had established sites, I would backlink to my new sites through guest authoring at well-established, high-trafficked websites. This not only got my sites indexed but also created immediate SEO value for my site. Guest posting or guest blogging would be my #1 way for naturally getting your new site ranked and your urls submitted to the search engines.

Conclusion

You can get your new site crawled and indexed in the search engines faster by establishing a link connection to a site which is already indexed – especially one that is important to the search engines (traffic, pagerank, age).

Have any other search engine submission tips? Leave them in the comment section below so that everyone can benefit 🙂

Traffic To Website: Top 10 Ways To Get It

September 16, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 4 Comments

How To Get Traffic To Your Web Site

No matter what niche you are in, if you are online, you are constantly thinking about how to attract traffic to your website. But I’m sure that you’ve recently noticed, that getting traffic to websites is no easy feat. It’s not a quick sprint – but rather it’s a slow and steady marathon. It’s also nothing that you need to spend hundreds or thousands of your hard earned dollars on either. It’s not rocket science! It’s simple, I’ve done it for years, and this is what you need to do…

Traffic To Website Strategy 1 – Build A WordPress Blog

There are so many statistics proving that Google loves blogs. Blogs, especially WordPress blogs are built on a structure that makes it easy for search engine spiders to crawl. Which means they can find and rank your content quickly and easily.

Traffic To Website Strategy 2 – Write About Stuff People Search For

If you write articles on topics, strategies, or solutions that people search for on the web, you will get traffic. It’s a basic supply and demand theory. If you supply the information which is in demand – you will get the traffic to your website.

Traffic To Website Strategy 3 – Select The Right Keywords

Getting traffic to your website is sooooo much easier when you select keyword phrases that REAL people would use to find information on your topic. Get those right – and the traffic wouldn’t stop no matter what you do. I like the free keyword tool over at Wordtracker to conduct main and long-tail keyword research.

Traffic To Website Strategy 4 – Write Consistently

I pay close attention to my traffic statistics and my traffic steadily increases every time I publish. I can’t say it any simpler than that. Publish more and you’ll see more traffic. Especially if your site is on Google’s radar.

Traffic To Website Strategy 5 – Build Your Buzz

Beginners online have it so much easier than us oldies but goodies! How? Because you can use the growth of social media sites to create a “buzz” or a strategic conversation around your biz. All for free! The key is to not try and do everything and overwhelm yourself. Strategically pick a few social sites that resonate with you and build your buzz at those places.

Traffic To Website Strategy 6 – Build Backlinks

Creating a one-way link back to your site from another relevant site is good for two things. One – it builds your importance and relevance to the search engines like Google. Two – it funnels traffic to your site. When you build backlinks from sites that are relevant and get traffic (such as a high-trafficked article directory), some of that traffic will start visiting you. So think of it in this way. If you establish one backlink from a site that sends you 100 visitors a day, and you establish just 9 more links like that, you will receive over a 1000 new visitors and potential clients/customers to your site – a day. For free! Just by establishing a one-way link a.k.a. backlink.

Traffic To Website Strategy 7 – Rinse And Repeat!

Complete and repeat steps one through six over and over and watch your results double and triple over time.

If you have a simple traffic to website strategy that you use to build traffic to your site, please share with the community here in the comments section below.

Problogger 7 Links Challenge

July 18, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 6 Comments

One of my favorite websites is Darren Rowse’s Probloger, and on it he has issued a challenge (#7Links) to folks who blog. In the post, we have to include links to 7 different blog articles that meet a particular criteria. The idea for it is that it’s fun to do, it allows us to link to other articles on our sites and keep people reading, and we also link to other folks who we like which is nice for them and good article marketing seo for us too.

If you own a blog and have written a few articles or more on it, I invite you to take the challenge as well. Well here are my answers…

Your first post: http://lisaangelettieblog.com/watch-where-you-blog/

This is a great exercise in reflection because I just noticed by writing this article that this month celebrates this blog’s 3rd year anniversary! Wow time flies. This first post I made was one I wrote after first starting out on WordPress.com instead of my own self-hosted blog. It was a mistake because there are just too many restrictions on WordPress.com when running a commercial site. So I switched to Blogger, which was fine for a while, until it wasn’t:)

A post you enjoyed writing the most: http://lisaangelettieblog.com/article-marketing-seo-welcome-to-better-google-rankings/

As my site has grown and my writing on it has evolved, I have really enjoyed writing about article marketing seo. Probably because I think it is SO important. I pick a keyword I want to rank for in my niche, I write articles to target those keywords, and I usually always rank in the Top 10 results for them. So this was the first post in a series that I wrote about how to write better, search engine optimized, articles. I could really continue on with this series. I think I’ll get back to it this week:)

A post which had a great discussion: http://lisaangelettieblog.com/what-time-should-i-post-to-twitter/

Sometimes it’s the articles you don’t over-think that get a lot of response with readers. Folks really wanted to know when was an optimal time to post to Twitter. While people commented on my blog, there was a continued conversation about it over on Twitter as well.

A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written: http://www.marlonsnews.com/top-10-things-that-worked-for-me-in-2009-and-3-that-didnt/

There were many articles that could have fallen under this criteria, but I picked this one by Marlon Sanders because of it’s transparency. The fact that someone I pretty much know is doing well online after all these years, talked about what worked for him in the previous year and what didn’t, gave me more advice and direction than what I’ve paid some coaches in the past. I’m working to do that for my community. Be more helpful and transparent.

Your most helpful post: http://lisaangelettieblog.com/bare-or-bear-a-grammar-lesson/

Based on my Google Analytics and my readers comments, many people like my mini grammar lessons. I can’t remember if this was the first one I wrote, but it is my most popular to date and one of the highest visited articles on my site.

A post with a title that you are proud of: Writing Articles: How To Write A Killer Opinion Article

I write ALL of my article titles with a combination of user readability + good keyword usage, and I think this title is a good combination of both. So having said that I was really happy with the results that this title gave me. I was able to tap into a writing market on the web which I normally do not access easily.

A post that you wish more people had read: http://lisaangelettieblog.com/why-new-coaches-should-write-articles/

I’m a coach and also worked as a psychotherapist. I know first hand the power of article marketing for this demographic. I wish a lot more coaches or coaching trainees had read this article.

*If you take the challenge, please post the link to your results in the comment section below so we can all take a look:)

Related Websites

Article Marketing Spotlight

May 6, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 3 Comments

Can I Feature You In The Article Marketing Spotlight?

UPDATE: I am now opening guest post “spotlight” opportunities to the public. Please read the submission guidelines.

I am going to add a new feature on this little ‘ole article marketing blog of mine and that is to start featuring or spotlighting articles written my members of our community and people who I think are getting their article marketing right. I really want this to be an opportunity for people to show off their writing, their business, their niche, and to show it off in front of a few more sets of fresh eyes via my site, my Twitter list, my Facebook friends etc.

Now I don’t want you to be shy. You will not be graded for this:) You will not fail a class. This is simply an opportunity to get your article writing and article marketing on and out in front of the world! Just to reiterate what is in it for you:

1. Your article will be featured LIVE on this website.

2. Your article will be promoted on my Twitterstream, Facebook, Ping.fm, and ~~The Article Marketing Network~~.

3. You will get a cool backlink from my site to yours. Always great for your SEO.

4. This could be your BIG start into guest blogging for sites. Which is a great way to drive new traffic to your site.

Ready to submit an article to the spotlight? Here are a few guidelines:

1. Please submit an article that is between 400-600 words.

2. You are only permitted two self-serving links, but you can place them anywhere in your article.

3. Please submit an informative article which best reflects what you offer or teach people in your niche.

4. I believe in article marketing SEO. So your article has a much better chance in being accepted if you include a keyword rich article title and meta tag keywords.

5. Submit your article in .doc or .txt format to us at our ~~SUPPORT SUITE~~.

*Hints For More Traffic:

If your article is selected for the article marketing spotlight, you probably have about 3 days tops that your article will be a featured article on the front page of my site. So as soon as your article is published, you should probably tell your list about it via email, tweet your Twitter list, and send updates to your Facebook friends and fans. That will send much more traffic your way.

What Are Infographics?

April 21, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 6 Comments

Adding an image to your articles makes them more interesting and appealing to the reader, and they also are looked upon favorably in the search engines. Google LOVES multi-media stuff. Especially when it’s relevant and related to your content. That’s why adding images such as infographics gives you the best of both worlds: using an image & having complete relevancy to your content.

So What Is An Infographic?
Well, information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex or a whole lot of information needs to be explained quickly and clearly. For a more detailed explanation, take a look at the definition as defined by Wikipdia.

Sites that use infographics really well are Mint.com and Quicksprout.com. The reason why they use them is because a well done infographic has the potential to go seriously viral on the web. In fact, the owner of Quicksprout said that his infographic on the complexity of the U.S. Tax System sent 20,000 visitors back to his site within two days!

In this infographic example to the left, I used the Washington D.C. Metrorail (subway) map. I remember using this back in college and boy was it helpful, and I also recall when New York City finally starting using these types of maps too and was I ever so grateful! I referred to them ALL the time. Think of infographics in those terms. Very helpful, useful, and colorful images that help explain or make an concept less complicated. Can you say VISUAL LEARNER 🙂

How Do I Create An Infographic?
The everyday entrepreneur probably doesn’t have the skills to create a nice looking information graphic (although I can only speak for myself:), which is why there are many companies that you can outsource this to. Companies that have a good reputation and track record for creating infographics include: Infographic World and Column Five. You could probably also find a good graphics design person through the freelance sites and contract the work to them.

How Should We Use Infographics?
While it’s true that the two examples I refer to of sites that use infographics are really “big” players on the web, I believe that us small guys can use them too. I think the key for us is to decide on what issue on a “hot” topic in our marketplace can we explain visually. Something that bloggers will want to link to. A topic that folks will want to share with each other. Digg and Stumbleupon. The potential for exposure and traffic is too big to not give it a try.

Another way to get our feet wet, is to simply use and link to (with permission) to other folks infographics, as long as they are relevant to your article subject. Most creators of these graphics would be more than happy for you to use their images as long as there is appropriate attribution.

Remember infographics are helpful to the reader, they build traffic, and they build high-quality backlinks to your site. I’m thinking of ideas for my first one already!

How To Create A Trackback URL