Now, I know this had a lot of you concerned.  After all, Google’s pretty much big dog these days.  if Google suddenly declared you had to kill a live chicken once a week in order to keep your page rank I’d bet a whole lot of us would be out looking for cleavers.

But for those of you who might have been concerned, linking outward really has nothing to do with your page rank.  It’s not a zero-sum game–your incoming links to other pages help their page rank, but they don’t specifically hurt yours.  Page rank is only measured by the number and quality of INCOMING links.

Though there is one caveat in the sense that, if you’re close in terms of page rank to another page, and you link to that page, you might bump that other page up sufficient to where you’ll drop.  But your number of outgoing links isn’t likely to directly affect you by much.

So link away, folks, you’re only helping others and giving you a chance to get links of your own.

You are unlikely to be the only blog in your particular niche, unless you have managed to corner such a narrow market that no one else writes in the space.  So assuming you have competitor blogs in your space wouldn’t it be nice to know who links to them ?

Why, you might ask would you want to know who was linking to your competitors blog? It’s important because if they are getting valuable inbound links that will positively impact their google page rank and of course drive traffic to them.

Once you know where their inbound links are coming from you can start to work on getting the same sites to link to you. So how do you get that information?

Use Yahoo as your search tool and the little known “linkdomain” command to reveal this information. It is used in the following format:

linkdomain:website address

For example if I want to see all the sites linking to this one I would type linkdomain:slyvisions.com

The drawback to that is it will show all referring links, including internal ones, to remove the internal links we simply add -slyvisions.com at the end, so we have linkdomain:slyvisions.com -slyvisions.com

How will you get more traffic from sites linking to your competitors?

Darren Monroe has published the results of his survey of bloggers (634 responded). The survey asked where the bloggers saw their traffice coming from, the results are very interesting.

The majority of respondents said that they received most of their traffic from Social Media, the second highest source was Search Engines.  Between these two sources, 20% of respondents said they received between 20 - 50 % of their traffic from Social Media and the same amount from Search Engines.

This really shows the power that Social Media has in driving traffic to your blog, when combined with a strong Search Engine strategy there are obvious gains to be made in being able to drive additional traffic to your blog.

You can see the full results here.

Are you combining both Social Media and Search Engine strategies?

Your post titles are the first thing that your readers and potential readers see. Its the link in the search results and it is what most readers base their decision on when deciding to read the rest of your post.

So why do you spend so little time on them? Perhaps because it is just that one liner at the top of the page, after all it doesnt take up as much space as the post itself so it can’t be that important can it?

Here are 3 things that will make your Titles bad:

1. Writing them before you write the post - we all do it, thinking that it will define what we write, but actually it doesn’t. Write your post first then write the title to make sure it fits.
2. Trying to be clever - Catchy titles are great if you can really pull them off, the problem with them is that they often don’t contain keywords, so they work well for your readers, but only if they can find the post in the first place. Leave the clever writing for the body.
3. Being too cautious - Take a position with your titles, be controversial, ask a question, make a statement. When potential readers are scanning those first ten results on page one of google you need to jump off the page at them.

What do you do to make your titles stand out?