I am trying to raise the Google placement of several articles to offset a terrible posting that has been...?

[Wonderer]

I am trying to raise the Google placement of several articles to offset a terrible posting that has been written about our non-profit. Given my very basic understanding of SEO, it would seem that posting links from "good" pages about our non-profit on major web sites (NBC, CNN, etc.) within the comments sections or even on sites like this one would raise the visibility of the good pages. Is that correct, or too simplistic? Does Google screen out such links when it scans sites? Also, is it better just to post a link, or do it as an html link, and how does mentioning the key word (name of non-profit) affect it?

[mousetopher]

In general, most blogs and websites like this one add the rel="nofollow" tag to the links in comments, which basically tells Google spiders not to count it as a valid linkback to your website. So as far as SEO is concerned, it's a good link for encouraging traffic but not for boosting ranking. =(

It is best to post the link within html anchor tags, ie <a href="yoursite.com">Your Key Word</a> because this is how Google actually associates your URL with certain keywords. They HAVE to be linked like this, whether it's an external link or deeplinking within your own website.

A couple things you can do to boost your rank are:
1) Have friends post keyword targetted links to your site on their own websites, blogs, forum posts, twitters, myspaces, anything you can think of really. You can do this too if you have any of the above, or accounts on other websites that give you a "profile".

2) Google a list of "Do follow" blogs - these actually count comment URLs as valid backlinks for your site. It's best to actually read posts and make relevant comments, so this can be a bit time consuming. (There is software to help with this, about $50 or so.)
- To make it easier to pick out sites with dofollows, download the SEO Plugin for Firefox which will automatically highlight them in a godawful shade of red (don't worry, you can change it to a less garish light yellow or light grey. ) If you don't have Firefox, of course you'll need to dl it, which is no big deal.
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

3) The best way I know unfortunately requires monies. Take a couple of your best articles and do a quick rewrite of each, shouldn't take but fifteen minutes per article. (I can hook you up with a useful piece of software for this if you like.) Then, register an account on http://articlemarketer.com/ ($99 for 3 months, not too awful bad) - this allows you to submit your articles to hundreds (possibly thousands, I forget) of article directories.
- This is worth the money, because article directories allow authors to post a couple dofollows in the author bio, usually website url and or reference (the original article of course!) Assuming 200 - 300 directories accept a single article, that's six hundred good links right there. It's not hard to get accepted, just provide useful content, decent grammar and don't talk too long.
- When targetting your keywords, do not use the exact same keyword for every link, as Google will penalize for this. Mix it up, it doesn't have to be much: ie, My Nonprofit Site, Check out my Nonprofit, Our Nonprofit Organization, just as an idea.
- You can also submit your articles manually to free directories, but this would be hugely time consuming to even begin to approach the effectiveness of using the paid thingy.

Hope this helps, let me know if you need any more info.


ETA - As if this isn't exhaustive enough, I forgot to mention a few things.

- It's also useful to email the webmasters of high ranking websites that are related to yours and ask them if they'll do a link exchange. A lot of times they will, and it hurts nothing to ask. A linkback from a high PR site is a lot of times worth more than a bunch of low PR sites. (SEO for Firefox will also show you the PR of sites in the Google SERPs, to help you find some good sites to ask.)
- If you don't have any keywords, Google has a great free keyword research tool that shows you the traffic for certain search terms. Do a search on your current keywords and see what comes up. The tool will suggest related searches to you, so it's easy to come up with a handful of good ones to target.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- You're looking for high traffic keywords of course, but also for low PR in the top SERPs. (Translation: do a Google search of the chosen keyword in a new browser window and see what SEO for Firefox tells you about PR. If most or all of the sites on the first result page have a 0 - 1 PR, then the keyword will be cake to rank for. Might as well target your audience while you're launching a link building campaign, eh?)

Okay okay, I'm done now.

[TopSavings.Net]

You will want to post it as HTML with anchor text for the keyword you are trying to rank on. Depending on how popular the searched for term is, it may not even affect your non-profit. If the posting is on a site for consumer fraud or anything like that then you can rebut it there as well usually. If it is a fraudulent statement you can contact the webmaster of the site and have it removed.