Despite August being the holiday/vacation time, a lot has happened this month.

For this month’s round up on SEO Jo Blogs, I am going to focus on link building. The post to kick this off is the one by Julie Joyce on Search Engine Watching, giving the Link Building A – Z Guide Definition Terms.  If you have questions about link building before you read this, you certainly won’t after.

Guest Posting when done correctly is good for SEO

Grant Draper from VibeTech Media wrote an interesting post on searchenginepeople earlier this month about how to get the benefit of guest posting with Google’s blessing.  With the recent algo updates, webmasters may be scared about accepting guest posts.  But they should not be if the content is relevant to the site and it has not been written just for the sake of it, with a link back.  It is more important to have relevant content rather than getting a link from a high PR page (which used to help sites rank). If you are having guest posts on your site, make sure you set the guidelines, such as the length, the number of links within the body, the rights to the images and ask writers reply to comments.

Webmasters should also be outreaching to those who already writing about their products/services but not linking to them.

Press Release Sites will be Nofollowed

Syndicated press releases were over used and abused as it was one of the ways to increase a site’s ranking back in the day.  However, this is now no longer the case.  As Tad Miller said on Search.Mojo, Google wants links in all press releases to be nofollowed.  This is most likely due to the fact this is a paid link and press releases should be treated as advertisements. Platforms like PRWeb, PRNewswire and BusinessWire were over used and marketers put up to 5 links in one press release, which is of course unnatural. Google will force these companies tomake the links no-follow or it will remove its website from the Google Index, well that is certainly playing fair Google – not !! This should not really surprise anyone as it this is what happened to web directories.

Online PR is still important

So what should you do? Andre Bruce Smith wrote a post about the importance online press coverage and its role in SEO.  Think about creating a great story with the keywords you want to be known for and also a story that journalists will find interesting.  Then within this, make sure you can persuade the journalist to link to the news story – it needs to add value to their readers. If you can get your story on a well respected media site, this will help increase your online visibility. If the story is on a site that has a lot of traffic, you should also see referral traffic to your site.

NoFollow Explained

This is not new, but this month many people have been talking about nofollow, what it is and the reasons to use it. A nofollow link has a tag in the code rel=”nofollow”.  This means that particular link or page that is linking from will not receive page rank flow.  It is used when you do not want that page to receive page rank flow, but the tag is suggestive and Google might page page rank through that link should they wish. It is still important to have a link as it may drive traffic to your site.

Please note that in the past SEOs added the nofollow tag to links on their own site so that the link juice of the site was kept to certain pages only.  If there are 10 links on a page, then each link would receive 10% of that link juice, but this no longer is the case.  Webmasters should use the nofollow tag to sign in and register pages as you do not want to waste Google box crawling these pages.

So how can you build links?

By creating cool content, people will want to share it and also link back to it.  Google are happy with this type of link building .  It is important to have a content marketing plan to engage with their customers, not for solely gaining more links.  There are still ways to automate the “link building process” as recommended on Daily SEO Tip.  However, it is important to earn links, do not just expect you can get a link to your site.  One of the ways is to “think visual”, but if you are creating an infographic, make sure you stick to these points to ensure the infographic is link worthy.  Kyle Kam also suggests 5 advanced link building techniques.  Erin Everhart has gone even further and has written a post on 9 things we should never stop doing in link building. I particularly like one of her points about interviewing influencers in your industry and asking for their opinion as they are respected.  Followerwonk is one of the ways to find these influencers