SEO

Link Building

There are two aspects to SEO: on-page optimization and link building. If you're not including Yahoo! Answers in your link building program, you are missing an important part of the equation.

First of all, YA is popular. It's in the top 100 Alexa sites. 96 percent of the "answers" style social networking goes through YA. After Wikipedia, it's the number two reference site on the internet.

One reason that YA is great for link building is that you are asked to supply the source for your answer. YA wants you to post your link! Building traffic to your sites is easy becaus, unlike so many forums where you have to make numerous posts before you can reference your site, YA lets you post back to your site right away.

When YA started, you could get an immediate PR 9 link back to your site. But YA now has the hated "no follow code" complicating link building efforts.

But, while the links do not often show up in Google search, many webmasters have reported that they are indexed in MSN and Yahoo as a result of the link building strategy.

But indexing and link building is only one component of posting to YA. You are also able to generate highly focused traffic to your website through the site.

People reading and asking questions in the "video and online gaming" portion of the site are highly interested in the Sims. If you have an authority site on the Sims, they re likely to check it out.

Small Business SEM writer Matt McGee of Small Business SEM says that if he spends just an hour at YA twice a week, "I'm guaranteeing myself a traffic bump over the following several days. It never fails."

You should be recognized as an expert. Yes and no answers don't cut it. You want to give detailed responses. If the original poster chooses your response as the "best answer" it is highlighted. It becomes the first answer for all of the subsequent readers to see.

When you can, try to answer unanswered questions first. YA has an RSS feed which notifies you when a relevant new question pops up.

The person who answers first gets the most views and also is most likely to be chosen as best answer.When starting your link building campaign on YA, you should build a profile and upload an avatar. Tick the box that lets people contact you therough an email address that you have set up just for YA.Stick to one or two categories. Find the ones most relevant to your website. If you re going to be answering questions for multiple websites, create multiple profiles.

Try to answer the questions that come up for your top keywords in order to give you the "long tail" link building effect. The answers on YA are indexed for a long time.

To avoid looking like a spammer, link to sites other than your own as well.Finally, "make friends" in YA -- star other people's answers. Be a good answerer.

YA is a great place to generate a site s traffic through link building. You should plan to incorporate it on a regular, scheduled basis.

Article Published: Monday 17th December 2007