I am writing this post as I have had many people over the last month or so asking me about SearchWiki, and what it will mean to their positions in the search engines. “What if someone votes me down”? “How do I get people to vote me up”? Well… There is no real loss with rankings with SearchWiki, and this is why.

When you do a Google search you will notice next the the results a box with an arrow, this arrow allows you to vote the site up in the Google search listings, it also lets you vote the site down the listings. This means that if you do a search for “Motorbike Courses” and you come across a few results that are not of any use to you, then you can push them down in the listings on your search browser, however this also applies if you find a site low down on the rankings, you can pull it to the top on your browser.

SearchWiki also allows you to make comments about each individual listing too, so if you find a site with useful information, you can write a small description for yourself incase you need to use the same search again.

The reason why this should not bother people who are optimising their websites is because, if you are voted down by a browser, it will only count on their own browser, so if I was to vote your site down, nobody else would get them results (its all part of Google making personalised search, more personal). Look at it on the flip side, a person browsing your topic may even vote you up, or even better, vote your competition down lower than you.

SearchWiki does not effect search engine optimisation on a persons site, it just allows people to customise their own results.

For this to all come into effect, you need to be logged in to your Google account, how many people search without being logged in? Millions…..

Hold A Competition To Win A Prize!

People love getting things for free, especially if it is something that they have had to do very little or nothing for.

Hold a competition on your website that includes the top commentor on a blog over a 3 month period will get a free weekend away (maybe a golf weekend, or a romantic weekend). This will work very well if  you are looking to do link building from other blogs, or related websites. It will also keep people comming back to post on your website abd be involved in the community.

Once the competition is over, the people who have been posting on your blog over the past 3 months may continue to return and be involved with your blog just as they have been for the past 3 months, especially if it has been busy in the past three months with people interacting in the comments section.

There are other prizes and incentives that you can offer that will not cost you any money, but will still capture the interest of bloggers. For example, you can offer a sitewide link for the year to the top commentor over the last 3 months, or you could have this incentive as a rolling, monthly incentive. For example, the top commentor over the last month will have a sitewide link for the next month. This will capture the interest of people that are trying to build backlinks to their own site.

I have seen these tips work very well before in the past, and know of a few people that have gained many hundreds of links from other blogs talking about the incentive. for example: marketingpilgrim.com offer the top commentor a sitewide link for the month incentive, and I believe it works very well for them.

Start a Blog!

Don’t just write a blog full of content that does not mean anything because you will not get anyone want to return, or even more important, you won’t get any links from your readers. If you start a blog that is relevant to your topic, and you manage to keep it up to date on a regular basis with relevant content that is helpful to people, and that will be an interesting read, then over time you will start to generate natural links from readers that find your blog interesting and helpful.

You will then naturally gain more traffic to your site from people following them links to your website, and if they find it interesting, they may link to you too. Building a blog is all about quality rather than quantity. Ensure than you write quality content, this is how you will gain more backlinks.

If you are not sure how to build a blog, almost any Search engine optimisation Company should be able to help you intergrate a blog into your site for a low cost.

There are two types of blogs that you can start. First of all you can start up a free blog on sites like Blogger.com or myblogsite.com and you can link that blog through to your own website, alternativly you can personalise your blog abit more by adding a blog to your existing site. This in turn will make your own site bigger, and increase the amount of quality content to your site too.

This is the first blog post for SEO Positive on the new website. What better way than to start with a blog post that will help you to build links to your site to increase search engine positions, and also increase your inbound traffic too.

Building links to your website is one of the most basic methods of building good quality, relevant, targeted traffic. If you build the right kind of links to your website you should notice an increase in your traffic, and in your positions too. The best places to have links from, are sites that have keyword rich content with lots of good quality, relevant incomming links themselves. This will help pass on some link juice through your link to your website.

There are many ways of building good quality links from high ranking websites that are relevant to yours with very little or no expense to you at all. The main two things that you need when building links is, time, and knowledge. The knowledge part I can give you, with the time part however, thats why many people employ an SEO company like us.

I will continue this blog every weekday for the next couple of months buy giving you a new link building tip each day. I will of course be writing other posts in the mean time. I will number each tip as I go in the title so you can be sure not to miss any of them. (Link Building Tip #1) for example.