Blog Income Life

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Archive for category Link Building

Keyword Stuffing Confuses Search Engines

May 13

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Keyword | 3 Comments

keywiord buffet

keyword buffet

Keyword rich might be good for your static home page – don’t count on – but used liberally in your posts it has the same effect on search engine spiders as a buffet laden table of food:  no focus.  Keyword stuffing might be the better term for it and you know what you get when you stuff yourself at a buffet


Indigestion.


At our weekly Gather Success Challenge online get together, Alvin took us through a number of items we should keep in mind when writing our posts.


TITLE
Capitalize the first letter of each word in your title.  This Small change makes the title stand out more.


Consider:

Keyword stuffing  confuses search engines
vs
Keyword Stuffing Confuses Search Engines

As you can see the second title commands greater authority. Rule of thumb is that words such as the, a, and, for, are not capitalized.


PLUGINS
The beauty of using Wordpress is that there are plenty of plugins to help us optimize our marketing effort, but the one plugin that you must have is the All in One SEO.  When installed, enabled and configured, this plugin helps to optimize your keywords with  search engines.


PAGE URL
Each page has its own URL.  To optimize the keyword you are fighting for, place them at the beginning of the URL title.  For example:

The domain URL for this site is:  http:// www.blogincomelife.com
A page URL looks like this:  http://www.blogincomelife.com/new-look-for-blog-income/

The page URL always follows the domain URL.  After hearing what Alvin has to say, a better way to have titled my article would have been “Blog Income Sports a New Look” the reason being that the keyword is “blog income” and not “new look”.


KEYWORDS
Many of us tend to put as many of our keywords into our posts as possible with the idea that as  our sites are crawled, we begin to rank higher and higher for our list of keywords.

Stop it.

Too many keywords confuse the search engines.  They don’t know what sort of traffic to send to your site.

Use no more than three of your keywords.  Mention your main keyword once in the first 50 words of the post and once in the last 50 subwords, i.e., words related to your keyword or a slightly different phrasing of the keyword .


CATEGORIES
Just as with keywords, when writing your post think of two maybe three categories that it will fit into, definitely no more than five.


BACKLINKS
The importance of backlinks cannot be stressed enough.  Search engines consider backlinks as votes for your site – simply put, people like it and if people like it then the search engines give you good marks and move you up along their ranking.

Quality links carry more weight than others.  Here are some good ways to get quality backlinks:

-          Get backlinks from .com,  .org or .ed

-          Age domain matters

-          Authority sites (have lots of traffic, links and ranking)

-          Article directories

Comment on blogs that fit the above criteria.  Personally I like to mix it up otherwise  how would the newbies ever get started.

spider keyword buffet

spider keyword buffet


IMAGES
Now this was a new one for me.  When uploading images to your post, give the image an alt tag.  For example the when I uploaded the image above this was what I filled out.  Images get crawled and it’s just good practice to have something for the spiders to read.


There was so much more.  Each challenge is a stand alone.  You can always join and do the latest challenge.  Points add up.  At the end the participant with the most points wins to work with Alvin on his new project.  Definitely some of the participants are internet marketing savvy.  No matter.  If you participate you will learn.  From my perspective its all about tweaking the details – even if you only pick up one point, that point can make a huge difference to you.

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Link Exchange Strategies that Work

Nov 23

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Link Building, Making Money | 6 Comments

When speaking with other bloggers the topic of how to exchange links often comes up.  I am not a great fan of  requesting link exchanges. I think that this may have been effective in the past, but the value of two sites bouncing off of each other with links is minimal at best in helping you to grow your blog income life.  Those bots are getting smarter all the time and see that as being artificial.  Does that mean that you should never request any link exchanges?  No, of course not, but let’s strategize  for maximum effect and apply some basic rules.

1. Climbing the Page Rank Ladder
It’s a big payday if a PR4 or PR5 publishes a link back to you.  We dream of this.  Chances are that it will remain a dream unless we somehow earn that distinction and it certainly won’t be just by emailing a request for a link exchange.

I’ve read somewhere that it’s a numbers game and if we send enough requests to high ranking sites that some will accept, and that it takes only a few to make us look like an upcoming celebrity in the eyes of Google.  Personally I don’t like this approach.  It’s like throwing mud at the wall and hoping some of it will stick

2.  Guest Blogging.
One way to get a strong backlink from a high ranked blogger is to submit a guest post. Make it good.  Nathan Hangen who developed Twitter Rockstar has built up at least a portion of his blogging career by posting on high ranking blogs.  He says that he put in more effort into his guest blogs than he did into his own, that his best work is on other blogger’s blogs.  That makes sense.  If a high ranking blogger is going to give you valuable space on his blog the content and quality better be good.  Chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

3. Develop Relationships
I am a strong believer of developing online relationships.  Select blogs that are in your niche or are complimentary and post comments there.  But please, do me a favor, something more than just “Hey dude!  Great post man” … that is an insult.  There is no indication that you actually read the post and it looks like you are just milking the system.  Developing a good relationship in the blogosphere world is getting to know the blogger, and the best way is to read the posts and make good thoughtful comments.

The immediate thought is to pick out only the top bloggers to post on.  Sure, that is good but a top blogger who gets thousands of visitors a day and a lot of comments is not going to take notice of you, at least not right away.  His assistant might.  What you get here is a low value backlink to your blog.

There are many good up and coming bloggers who are in the lower hierarchies of page ranking – maybe not even ranked.  If there content is good, if they make me think, if I learn something from them, if I like their spunk and stick toitiveness, I’ll certainly comment. The favor may be returned but don’t expect it.  This is not the type of bouncing of links that I am talking about.  This begins to establish rapport with someone who is in your leagues, is on the way up and with whom you would like to build a relationship.  Even if you are ranking above this aspiring blogger, giving a leg up is good.

I think a good strategy would be to comment on both the super blogs and the up and coming ones.

4. Develop Your Own Community.
Search for bloggers not only in the same niche but with some commonalities so that you already establish yourselves as part of a group.  One of the best ways to do this is to comment on the blogs of commenters.  .  What you will find is that the same bloggers are commenting within the same grouping of blogs and that there is a bit of camaraderie already established.

5.  Become a Cheerleader
When you visit your colleagues’ blogs make note of their victories, big and small, congratulate them.  It’s a lonely world out there – sitting in your basement subsisting on ramen noodles…ok, I know of at least one guru who started that way – interaction and acknowledgement is powerful.

5.  The Daisy Chain
When you have rounded up a group of bloggers playing in your niche with complimentary topics etc. that’s when it is time to exchange links, or better yet, formalize a daisy chain.  I have done this with my dog related sites and it works well.  Here is how it goes:

Blog #1 – dog skin care:  my blog
Blog #2 – all about raw dog food: colleague blogger
Blog #3 – natural dog treats: my blog
Blog #4 – dog toys: colleague blogger
Blog #5 – pet insurance: colleague blogger
Blog #1 – dog skin care: my blog

It doesn’t have to be in that order.  Notice that I started with one blog and by the 6th link had returned to it.  This is a complete circle.  In between the blogs owned by my colleagues I peppered some of my other blogs.  These all have dogs as a common theme, the bots crawl all the sites connecting them to each other and giving the backlink credits to each one as it grows.   If you own a group of blogs that are complimentary as I do with my dog ones, you can actually do the daisy link process without even going out of your own, but then, you’re not developing relationships that way.  You can mix and match with the same grouping, just be mindful of straight bounce backs.

Granted the above takes time.  Is there a way to leapfrog this process?  Yes there is.  There are companies that have developed software systems that get you lots of links by auto-submission to bookmarking and directory sites.  I am using one such service.  It is still in beta but I am pleased with the results.  When I changed the domain name of this blog I lost all the backlinks of the original one that I had worked so hard for.  That was October.  I was crying the blues because I lost over 230 links.  As of today, with this service I have 872 backlinks. It is scheduled for a future review on this blog, so stay tuned.

Happy Blogging and Happy Linking

Valentina
872 backlinks in less than two months – nice brand of cheese.

RELATED POSTS:
Link Building Part III – Pingbacks & Backtracks  081009
Link Building – Part II  – 05/10/09
Link Building  – Part I – 02/10/09

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Blog Income Sports a New Look & A New Feature.

Nov 15

Posted by Valentina in Link Building, Making Money, Starting a Blog | No Comments

Short and sweet on a rainy Sunday afternoon …..

Two things:

1.  New Look of Blog Income Life
2.  New Feature for You

1.  New Blog Income Life Look.

How do you like the new look of Blog Income Life?

I changed it because a blogger whom I respect suggested that the theme I had was bland (or words to that effect).  I often thought about that myself and chalked in “custom design” as a future expense item for when the blog starts to bring in the bucks.  But when Glen Allsop, who owns and authors Viper Chill pointed out the blandness of the theme, I thought it was time to take action now.

Still I did not want to dig into my pocket to the tune of $2K for a webmaster just to redesign my blog and header and you know what my thoughts are when it comes to anything techie … not my strong suite, not an area I want to become an expert in.

What I did instead was to visit some other successful blogs.  I looked at their designs.  I noticed that while most were extremely well designed for SEO they did not really have bells and whistles and pictures and graphics and a slick “professional” look(well OK, Glen does have a slick logo on his header) – they were bang on about what it is that their blog is about and, I noticed, they were well monetized.

Back to the drawing board.  The good thing about Wordpress Direct is that there are plenty of templates to choose from.  After going through the choices several times I chose this one.  It’s cleaner, modern and to the point and took me all of a minute to change the template … I also like where the comment option appears.

Do you like it?  Yes?  No?  Post your comments below.

New Blog Income Life Comment Feature.

This is a do follow blog, in other words, if you comment on this blog the bots will follow your comment to your blog and give you what is known as link juice, or backlinks, but unless you know how to check this out, there is nothing to show the visitor that this is a comment friendly blog.

To those with quizzical looks on their faces now, the common practice these days is to not allow “do follow” in which case, when you post a comment to someone’s blog, the bots will not follow the link back to your site.  This was implemented some time ago to discourage spam comments.  If you comment on such a blog, your effort is not entirely wasted,  as if your contribution was worthy,  some of the readers may visit your blog, so inch by inch, traffic becomes a synch.

While visiting other successful blogs I noticed that many used the Comment Luv plugin.  Success leaves clues.  I went and registered at Comment Luv and downloaded the plugins for both the Comluv and Twitterlink features.  Now, when you comment here, the title of your latest blogpost will appear and it will be tweeted to your twitter community.  You do need to register at Comment Luv to activate this feature and while you are at it, add the plugin to your own site – it also has an affiliate.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Comment Luv luvs cheese!

Other Related Posts on Backlinks:
Link Building Part III – Pingbacks & Backtracks
Link Building – Part II
Link Building  – Part I

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Fork in the Road

Oct 21

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Making Money, Plan Development | 2 Comments

You have now been on the blog income journey for several months and have come to that proverbial fork in the road. Which one to take?

In yesterday’s post I talked about the next step to take in developing your own Blog Income Life.

The two options covered in that post were:

1. Take the road most traveled. Continue polishing what you have learned so far and get really good at it. While it may seem that this is a static position to take, it really is not if you rinse and repeat with a purpose and have a new goal to aspire to. Certainly you will get more attention from Google and other search engines with a result of at least some incremental traffic increase. Your expertise on your chosen topic will expand – even if you already know a lot about it, it is amazing how much more knowledgeable you will get as you do more and more research so as to meet the fresh content requirement for a robust blog.

You might even want to put up another blog in the same field, using a different niche within it. Your current blog and the new one should be complimentary but preferably not identical. An example might be if your current blog is all about canning vegetables, a complimentary blog could be making your own fruit jams or preserves. Or, you may want to take the same topic but market to a different demographic. For example if your blog is about working a business from home, stay at home moms are a different demographic than boomers facing retirement. This is a strategy that is often taken by the gurus. In fact they often have a slew of complimentary blogs.

One of our exit strategies when we first build blogs is to sell them. When you have a grouping of related blogs, all of which are enjoying traffic, ranking and revenue producing, you can bundle the lot and sell them for a premium over selling just one blog.

2.Choice two is taking the unknown, the road less traveled. If you are ready to take on a new discipline to advance your internet marketing knowledge, to apply it to your blog and see exponential traffic growth (ok, eventually), then this is where you want to go.

This is a good time to decide what you want to tackle next. Here are some considerations:

- Learn how to market smartly using social media
- Choose one social marketing membership site to become an expert at, i.e., Twitter or Facebook
- Specialize in article marketing
- Learn how to effectively market affiliate products
- Become an expert on the importance of keywords and how to best use them
- Become a master at link building

There are plenty more but by now you have some familiarity with the above. This is where I recommend you pull out your wallet and buy a course on your choice. It doesn’t have to be expensive, in fact I recommend that you do not spend more than $100, $200 at best. There are lots of good courses that are significantly less than that.

In my “based on making money” opinion, affiliate marketing is the next obvious fit. Learning how to effectively market affiliates puts bigger dollars in your pocket and it is a good method of getting noticed by the owner of the product – why is that important? It opens the door for future joint ventures and then the big bucks begin to roll in. Yup! That would be the money truck.

Tomorrow more on Affiliate Marketing.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for my big cheese!

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Link Building: Anchor Text

Oct 19

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Link Building | No Comments

Today we will tackle anchor text.

What is anchor text?  It is simply the text in a hyperlink which when clicked takes you to another page or site.  It is another way to build links and  driving traffic to your site so that you can begin to live the blog income life.

What differentiates this type of link from all the others discussed is that it is descriptive of what you will find on the page it is taking you to.  For example passive income is an anchor text which when clicked will take you to a site on earning passive income dollars.  The words passive income are descriptive of what the reader may expect when clicking on that hyperlink.

Google and other search engines place a high value on the proper use of anchor text in your postings.  It is important to note that the search engines are “ranking” the destination page by the anchor text.  To illustrate, passive income takes you to the site http://www.earnpassiveincomedollars.com .  Google looks at passive income as the search or keyword that it ascribes to the site.  For that reason it is important to remember to make your anchor text relevant to the page that the visitor is going to be taken to.

A frequent error that is made by internet marketers is to use the words “click here” when they want to take you to another page on a subject they are writing about.  Staying with the passive income theme, my article might have said something like this:

“for more information on passive income click here”

making “click here” the hyperlinked anchor text that takes the reader to the site on passive income.  The search engines will translate “click  here” as a keyword for that site.  If you get a lot of clicks for that anchor text, the site will begin to rank high for “click here” which of course has nothing to do with the topic of the site and will not drive any traffic for you.

I frequently use anchor text to refer to previous pages on this blog or, as in my posting on Why I chose Wordpress Direct I used the following anchor texts

Wordpress, Wordpress.com & Wordpress.org
This anchor text took the reader to an article that discussed the differences amongst the various Wordpress products.

Wordpress vs Blogger
This anchor text took the reader to an article on the comparisons of Wordpress and Blogger

Each of these phrases is descriptive of the pages that the reader could expect to get more information on when clicking on these hyperlinked texts.  Notice also that  I just  used the anchor text feature for the title of the article in which these anchor texts appear.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Living a Blog Income Life
… and getting my own cheese.


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Link Building Part III – Backtracks and Pingbacks

Oct 8

Posted by Valentina in Link Building | No Comments

Link Building Part III – Pingbacks & Backtracks

This is post #3 in a series of articles on Link Building

In the last post we covered backlinks – these are links that point to your blog or site from an outside location.   We used the analogy of air travel to explain how this works.  Quick review:  A travel review in a Singapore publication makes reference to the city you live in.  Readers of that article decide to visit your city.  They fly from Singapore to your city.  The Singapore publication is the outside location, the flight is the link, and the tourists that visit your city as a result of that reference are the traffic. This type of link is often referred to as an inbound link.

Today we’ll take a look at a different type of link – the Pingback or the Backtrack which is typically generated by an outbound link.  Confused yet?  Good, I was too and quite frankly am not sure if there is a difference between a pingback and a backtrack – the two terms seem to be used intermittently yet some blogging professionals say that there is a difference.  If there is a difference it is slight and not one that I think we should obsess about (I may have to revisit this statement some time in future should I learn that omigosh!  the difference may be slight, but the importance huge …. aaaahhh, semantics).

For a quick overview of what a pingback or a backtrack is, lets stay with the travel analogy.  This time you are posting on your blog and make reference to Singapore, maybe make a nice comment about your holiday there.  Now if your blog is built upon Wordpress, and Singapore is built on Wordpress, then the system automatically notifies, or “pings” Singapore to let it know that reference on your blog has been made to it This is generated by you on your own blog and is also known as an outbound link.

If Singapore allows pingbacks/backtracks, it will check out your blog to make sure that it is legitimate and if it is satisfied then it will pingback to your original article, usually with a summary of your post along with your link.  Voila!  There you have it.  That is a backtrack/pingback.

Now I’ve been checking the web to see who might have posted something on backtracking and/or pingbacking on their blog so that I could use it as an example.  I found that none other than Yaro Starak had posted on this very same topic on his blog http://www.Entrepreneurs-journey.com .  Here Yaro talks about backlinks, pingbacks and backtracks … yes, I know, just thinking about it is enough to send me off on a tailspin.  Yaro is an uber blogger whom I admire greatly.  I am sure that he drinks fine wine, feasts on gourmet foods, and I know for a fact that he travels to exotic  destinations all on his blog income.  By mentioning his blog and a link to his site, I have created an outbound link.  I believe that both of us are on a Wordpress system, so he will be automatically informed, or “pinged” of this mention.  Hop on over there and read a master’s explanation on this whole link building thing.

Happy Blogging

Valentina

Blogger for Money
………..and for cheese!

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Link Building Part II – Backlinks

Oct 5

Posted by Valentina in Link Building | 2 Comments

This is Post #2  of a series of articles on Link Building

In Link Building Part I, I explained the role that link building plays in marketing your blog and its importance in gaining authority and credibility with the search engines.  I gave an example of how a series of backlinks creates a path to your site and how it can increase traffic to your blog.  Today I want to talk about just two ways of building those backlinks.

In the internet marketing world, backlinks are also referred to as inbound links. Think of that as air travel.  The inbound flights are the ones that are arriving to your city from somewhere else.  They bring passengers.  There are two types of passengers on those flights:  returning residents and visitors.  The “inbound” link is the flight and the visitors who come to your site through that link are traffic.  Some of that traffic will be new. Some of that traffic may be returning because they bookmarked your “link” as a favorite – yes, they like what you have to say!

There are plenty of  ways to get back links.  Two of the most powerful and effective (in my opinion) are

1.  article marketing.
2.  web directories.

You know a little about article marketing already and I hope that you are submitting fresh versions of your blog postings to article directories.  You may want to revisit my posts:

Article Marketing

http://www.blogincomelife.com/making-money/traffic-generating-techniques-part-ii

Keyword Rich Articles

http://www.blogincomelife.com/making-money/traffic-generating-techniques-part-iii

What I want to stress here is the importance of the Resource Box.

When you open an account with an article directory, you get to fill out a bio and a Resource Box.  In that box you tell a little about yourself and you put a link to your blog.

When your submitted article is published by the article directories, it has a page of its own on the internet and it will include your Resource Box. Now there is a unique page or “site” on the internet with a backlink to your blog.

But it does not stop there.  If your article is a good one, chances are that it will start getting picked up by other publishers – of blogs, of websites, of ezines.  When they publish your article they also give credit to you by including the Resource Box.  It literally goes viral.  There is no telling how often your article will get picked up.  I still have articles that I published  two years ago and that are  still getting picked up today.  Every article pickup is a backlink to your site.

The other good backlink is to publish your link in the Web Directories.  These are category based rather than keyword search based – so lets say your blog is about dogs, you publish your domain/URL in the directory, giving a brief description of what the visitor might expect on visiting your blog.

Major search engines do look at directories and when they find new links they send their ‘bots to visit and report.  What makes a directory link a good one is that it is relevant because directories only publish links in the appropriate category.  It definitely gives you a good backlink and might even bring you up a position or two – or more – on your quest for good rankings with the search engines.

These two strategies for generating quality backlinks should keep you busy – and remember to incorporate them as part of your “system” for marketing your blog.

Remember, he who has the most backlinks gets to drink fine wine, eat gourmet foods, travel on exotic vacations and live in his dream home!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

The mouse with the most cheese is the mousetess with the mostess!

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Link Building Part I

Oct 2

Posted by Valentina in Link Building, Making Money | 5 Comments

Link Building is the next step on your journey to developing an awesome blog income life. Lets review where we started and where we’ve come to:

  1. topic
  2. keywords
  3. domain
  4. platform
  5. posting
  6. article marketing

By now you should have lots of posts on your blog, and by default you have done some link building without knowing it.  If you have done any article marketing, you have links that connect your articles to your blog.  If you downloaded my free PDF on ABC’s of Blogging for Money and followed the chapter on driving traffic, then you will have additional links from your comment postings on other blogs and in forums you may be participating in.  These are backlinks and that is what we want lots more of.

What exactly is a backlink?

Well firstly what is a link?  A link is a pathway between one site and another.  A backlink is a site that takes the reader from another site to yours, it is also know as an inbound link.  This is what links look like:

http://www.naturaldogskincare.com

That is the URL for the dog site that I opened for this year’s 30 Day Challenge.

Pretty much everyone on the internet knows that if they click on this blue/purple lettered underlined phrase, they will be taken somewhere else, in this case to my site.

Off the top of my head I do not recall if any of my postings had links to any of my other dog sites except for the K9 KlearUp product.  But supposing I did.

A visitor is on my dog skin care blog and while reading an article comes across a link to my raw dog food link, clicks that on, from that site clicks on to a link I might have posted about best dog food diets, which may or may not be mine – lets say it belongs to someone else, from that site they may click on a link that takes them to a pet insurance site and so on.  Can you see the pathway that has been created?

See how the more backlinks we have on the internet, the better are the chances of users finding our site.

The pathway created is also a pathway for search engines to follow.  When a search engine comes across a link to our site it sends out bots or spiders to crawl that link to report back on the content.  Those critters will continue following the trail before eventually coming back with a glowing report to mother search engine on how well your site is thought of by other site owners.  Search engine makes note and promotes your position withing its rankings.

This overly simplistic explanation, is one way that search engines build up their data bank.  Google and other search engines look at several things when assessing those links including:

a.  Is the link hosting site’s content congruent with the links
b.  Is the link hosting site ranked well

On this point, in the example of the dog skin care link, the content of that link does not meet the congruency test.  To overcome this I have added a bit of content about dogs.  Now it makes it somewhat relevant. The ideal option would have been to use some of my other blogs on income building but they are all currently under renovation so would not have been a good example.

A word of caution here.  Online marketers quickly caught on to the benefits of posting comments on other’s blogs just for the sake of getting the backlinks.  It wasn’t long before comment spamming reared its ugly head.  One way to explain what comment spamming is to cite the many instances that a comment added to a blog does not add any value, a common such comment would be something like “Great Post” or ” Good stuff, thanks for the post”.  While not necessarily absolute the comments do beg the branding of being spam as they appear to be just milking the system to generate backlinks.  Now there are systems which have a “no follow” rule,  so that when search engines come crawling and they come across these backlinks, the “no follow” rule tells the ‘bot or spider not to follow that link.  More on this at a future date.

The second item is more difficult to control.  It is not the easiest thing to get a good backlink from a highly ranked site, say a Google PR 5.  One way is to post comments on such high ranking content congruent sites, but again, Google assigns a lower value for comment generated back links than if the owner of that site mentioned yours within her content or put up your  link in the “recommended” links section.

By building your link network you are developing credibility and authority with the search engines.  They view backlinks as votes of confidence from the owners of those sites.

Your job if you want to drink fine wine, feast on gourmet foods, travel to exotic destinations and live in the house of your dreams is to generate a massive blog income.  Your mission should you decide to accept it is to develop that massive income by building a complex web of links.

Stay tuned for further posts on Link Building

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for money – living the good life.

PS … can you say “cheese”


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