Every business owner, small and large wants to do SEO. But if not done right, their SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering their sites. That’s why it’s advisable to hire a professional SEO firm or people who know what the heck they are doing.
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A good SEO firm, among other things, has the responsibility of creating quality content or bait that helps attract incoming links to a client’s website. The more the number of incoming links, the higher the rank of the site will be in the search engine result pages. That is the bottom line.
So what are those “other things” that a good SEO firm will or should do for your business?
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SEO is an ever changing world. What clicked in 2007 is passé and what is in vogue today may be out of use tomorrow. Search engine change tactics and algorithms very fast and this way they can keep the black hat measures in check and also implement strategies to channel the ever-expanding volumes better. After all, the algorithm is a mathematical computation that is being affected by volume-change.
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It is easy to understand the different strategies of search engine optimization, but it is difficult to apply those strategies to a plan of action that will work to increase your website’s ranking. The key to proper search engine optimization is consistency and variety. You must constantly build links to your website utilizing different strategies. This is because SEO is not written in stone; search engines are always changing. To counter these constant changes, adding variety to your SEO efforts will offer a safety net in case a search engine changes its algorithm.
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A critical step in your small business internet marketing efforts is on page search engine optimization. Search engine optimization as a whole involves three major steps:
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2. Content editing and creation
3. Natural Link Building
Many SEO professionals and Internet marketers think of page rank, the rating google gives to every website, as a worthless measure of their websites’ overall link popularity, but in fact it can be quite a useful tool.
Page rank is measured by the amount and
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When doing internal SEO for your site, it is important how you distribute your “Google juice” to all the links on your site.
After all, you don’t want to pass most of your Google juice to all the other – non-important to rank but still very important – links on your site and leave your home page with no strength to rank well in the search engine result pages!
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Such a big part of getting high rankings in the search engines is knowing how to improve link popularity. For example, Google looks at links as the main factor on how they rank websites in their search results. Links give the search engines an idea of how important a website is. By seeing how many other websites link to yours, they can tell whether or not your site is important. Each link pointing to your site counts as a vote for your website’s importance.
Another important factor of improving link popularity is the knowledge that it does matter what links point to your site. In other words, not all links are created equal. When you begin the process of building link popularity, there are some important principles to remember:
» Avoid Link Farms and Free For All links pages at all costs – many search engines will not recognize these as legitimate links
» Get links from websites that are relevant to your website - the closer the website is related to your the more weight it will carry
» Get links from websites that have many back links - search engines look at linking many levels deep, if a site that links to you has many links pointing to it, its a better link for you
» Try to get non-reciprocating links to your site - when you link back to the person who is linking to you it carries less weight with the search engines, try to get one way links
» Submit to as many directories as possible - you never know which directories will help improve link popularity so submit to a lot of them, just make sure they offer a one way link (no reciprocation)
Buying Text Links
There is some debate in the SEO industry on whether or not buying text links really work. I recently read a blog post from an employee of Google that said that when they find sites that are selling blocks of 10-20 text links, Google will not count any links found on those websites. He even specifically pointed out links sold by Text-Link-Ads.com as ones that are worthless.
Having said that, there is debate that these links do help with Yahoo and MSN. So the tough decision is whether the increase in rankings you get from Yahoo and MSN is worth the price of the link.
My advice would be that if you are happy solely with the traffic that you get directly from people clicking on the link, then it is worth paying for it, otherwise spend your money elsewhere.
Link Building The Right Way
Over the years I have worked with over 200 websites as an SEO consultant. The advantage of having worked with so many different sites is that I could effectively test what works and what doesn’t work.
During that process I have learned how to build link popularity for clients to make it look as natural as possible to the search engines, thus maximizing search engine rankings.
The biggest thing to consider when trying to improve your link popularity is that search engines want to see links that are naturally added to the web. Many of the link building services out there will help you get alot of new links but these links hold little value in the eyes of the search engines.
For example, reciprocal links used to have a great effect on rankings, now you probably get 10 emails a day that tell you how great your site is and that you should do a link exchange with them. Because this process is so abused, these types of links have been discounted.
A natural link is one that is embedded into the content and flow of a website. For example, a natural link would be one where in the middle of this paragraph, we link to another site because they are a good resource on the subject I am talking about. Just like the phrase “natural link” above is a link to another site.
These types of links aren’t reciprocal, and they don’t appear to a search engine to be purchased so the SE’s give them more weight.
Some tools for effective link building
One Way Text Links – As one way links have become a hot topic in the SEO world, this website will allow you to track your submissions to over 600 directories that will give you a one way link. Since most of the websites are free, this is by far the most cost effective way to improve link popularity.
Need Help Building Your Link Popularity?
Since there’s been a lot of confusion and questions lately about the “importance of”, the “how to’s” and “what if’s” regarding link building, I thought I’d post a few tips on how to go about getting some link love for your site or business.
First of all, without getting links to your website, it’s very hard, almost impossible, to rank for your search term(s). That’s why it’s important. You need some links pointing to your site and content. Website submission services do not work. In fact, I would not recommend that you submit your new website to Google.
Submitting your site to Google basically informs Google that your website is new and what Google will do is then put it in the dreaded “sandbox”. Once in the sandbox, Google will monitor your site to make sure it’s not a spammy site and that it can be trusted. This process can take from a few months to a year.
So the best way to avoid all that is to have other sites (the popular, the better) linking to you. The Google spider bots will find your links on those popular sites and then index your site that way. Your site won’t need to spend time in the sandbox with no traffic.
So now that we have established the importance of getting links, let’s see how to get those links.
Using community websites and forums.
There’s literally a forum for every topic out there. All you need to do is Google “your topic name+the word forum”. Register and post on these forums. Do not spam. Just post helpful tips and advice that help the other users on the forum. That way, you will gain trust and more business.
And if you get an itch to post about how wonderful your site is, just remember, people nowadays are bombarded with ads everyday. So do not actively promote your website or even say how good your company or amazing it’s products are.
Another thing to do on a forum, is to set up your signature link in your forum profile. This signature is actually a link to your site and on very popular forums that are crawled a lot by the bots, it is always a good thing to have your signature. Some forums may require a few posts from you before allowing you to put a link in your signature. So do it and then move on to another forum.
Make sure that the posts you write in the forums are meaningful otherwise the other members of the forum will turn you in quickly and get you removed.
Write and Submit articles to news sites and social sites.
Everybody has a story to tell. If you create interesting readable content people will link to it.
So just write your story, in the most exciting way possible, and submit it to the social news sites out there. If it is interesting, people will link to it. Lots of people.
Next time we will look at even more methods of gaining inbound links.
