Daniel Coburn

One very important thing about building links externally is to make sure you do not link spam.  What is link spam?  That’s when you post links to your site for the sole purpose of gaining a link in a post, comment etc.  While many of the blog’s out there now have rel=”nofollow” standard with all links there are still people that feel the need to spam it.  If you are going to go to a blog, or a forum try to make sure you add value.  First it gives people a reason why they might actually want to follow your link to see what you have to say.  So become a part of the community and not a spammer in the community.  It will give you credibility and a good chance of getting people to link to you because of the benefit you have shown them as an active part of the community.

What does it mean to have unique content?  Is it that you take an RSS Feed from 8 places and merge them together? Is it taking articles and editing a few words here an there?  No it means original content.  Sure you can easily aggrigate content from multiple sources and be someone’s one stop shop, but you’ll never be that one stop shop for the search engines.  You need to have a few original thoughts in your life about your topic, if you do, write about them.  Or if you read a really good article, you can post a summary of it and then link to the original if you want.  The important thing is that your site should be different from everyone else’s site.  This will give more reason to give your site higher rankings and gets spiders looking at you more often than not.  If you are blogging for personal benefit, then that should be easy, but if you are blogging on a topic some people will fall into the not so unique content.  It’s important to be aware of limitations and just keep writing, even a “bad article” is better than a copied one.