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Posts Tagged ‘Backlinks’

How to Get Backlinks

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Backlinks are vital for good SEO. Even if you get absolutely everything else right, it is very unlikely that you will make it to the first page without some backlinks. Of course, it can be tricky to get good backlinks, because the best backlinks would come from other sites in your niche. Obviously, the webmasters of those sites are going to see you as a competitor. They won’t be too eager to give you a link that might help you outrank them!

The good news is you can create your own backlinks very easily. There are many easy ways to do this, and you can even hire someone to do this for you for as little as $3 per hour!

One easy way to get backlinks is through article marketing. Article marketing is the process of writing articles and submitting them to websites called article directories. These directories often have very good authority with Google and other search engines, so the articles can rank high, and they can provide very high-quality backlinks.

In exchange for giving the directory free content, you get a link or two back to your site, usually in a section at the end of the article called the resource box. Occasionally the links in resources boxes are tagged with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, which makes them useless for SEO purposes. But you can easily find out whether a particular directory uses this tag by using the Firefox plugin “NoDoFollow” to view the page. Nofollow links are highlighted in pink when using this plugin.

Another easy way to get backlinks is to comment on blogs. Most blogs use the nofollow tag on the links in comments, but you can find blogs that don’t by searching for “dofollow blogs” on Google. This will return several dofollow blog directories where you can find blogs for getting backlinks.

Finally, you can get very easy backlinks by creating small feeder sites on social content sites like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com. These will give you a quick backlink, as well as some additional traffic from people who actually read those feeder pages.

Posted by Admin on April 26th, 2010

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PageRank vs. SERP

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About five years ago, you may noticed an increase in importance of PageRank. PageRank being created in 1998 wasn’t much of a figure when Google was a PageRank of 10 (the highest) and countless other sites were their minions. Today, we see about 20 sites that are of PageRank 10 (such as Microsoft.com and Facebook.com) and so the overall domination of the PageRank algorithm might be in decline.

Behind the scenes, SERP (Search Engine Results Page) has done its job in ensuring fairness, on-page and off-page SEO-wise. SERP is on the rise, with many sites ranking well for its main keyword. You don’t have to have an excellent amount of traffic, or backlinks in order to have a great SERP ranking and so it really makes it fair in the long run for all sites.

So, when you put them both up together, side-by-side, which one is more preferred? Firstly, you must understand what affects each of them. To gain a high or higher PageRank, you will need quality backlinks which are one way, towards your site (ie. inbound links). On-page SEO has some impact, although minimal. To gain a high or higher SERP ranking, you must on and off page optimization of targeted keywords in anchor text for links and alternative text for images.

You should note that you can have a great SERP ranking, and develop a high PageRank from that, however, you don’t need to have a good SERP ranking to have a high PageRank, as it is dependent on backlinks.

When it comes to sales, many disregard the power of SERPs. I see too many sales focused on PageRank, and most of the time, PageRank does drop for those buyers, hence resolving in a bad sale. Your SERP ranking is dependent on your ethical ways of dropping in an optimized link on other sites. It would be hard for a great SERP to plummet down as those optimized links are there, forever (unless a site closes etc.).

I would argue that your SERP ranking is much more important now in getting your site seen. Before you know it, your PageRank will catch up as well. You should optimize your links and image links. Its as simple as placing anchor text and alternative text. For example:

Instead of:

http://www.semreach.com

You should optimize it with anchor and even title text, to result in:

<a href="http://www.semreach.com" target="_blank" alt="Search Engine Marketing Blog" title="SEM Reach">SEM Reach</a>

Repeating this on multiple sites do help gain much needed SERP points.

Good luck.

Posted by Admin on April 18th, 2010

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Importance of Google Analytics

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How important is Google Analytics for webmasters and website owners? Is the information valuable? What has this got to do with Search Engine Marketing?

Google Analytics is the basis of where most marketing relies on. It holds the most up-to-date statistics for any site with Google Analytics installed on it. The information is has does make or break a deal between the buyer and the seller.

To perform a simple deal between a buyer and a seller, the basic, raw statistics would be unique page views and Page Rank. The buyer would look into how those unique hits add up and see how that is reflected in the Page Rank, or possibly the Alexa Ranking. This can all be found via Google Analytics and PR tools.

When deals become professional based, such as advertising on major sites and forums, much more detailed information is needed. To start off, you would need unique hits, overall page views, traffic source, site revenue (Adwords, Adsense etc.), site overlay, demographics, and really, the list goes on.

Where can you find this information? Google Analytics, of course. It is also a great source as many dealers relate it back to Page Rank, which is a trademark of Google, as well as backlinks, which many look at Google’s.

So what does this mean if you haven’t got it installed? Well, it won’t be a major draw back if you can easily show your dealers that you have a great SERP keyword and you achieve a top 100,000 Alexa ranking, but this is really what you can only go off. Dealers want that juice, they want to expose your site and see what potential it can bring. If you can’t show that, then what use is there in making deals?

Posted by Admin on April 14th, 2010

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Hiring a SEO Company

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Sometimes you may not have the time or skills to do your own search engine optimization, or at least not in a time frame that is acceptable to your company. In this case, it may be faster and easier to hire an SEO company to do it for you.

Hiring a good SEO firm is no easy task. There are so many companies out there that claim to be “the best”. Some make outlandish claims that they can get you to number one on Google, and will even guarantee results. The trouble is, no legitimate company can make a guarantee like that.

Any company that makes a guarantee that they can get you to the number one position should be eliminated from the list of potential candidates immediately. If they make such a guarantee, they’re either lying, or they are dishonest.

If they mean they can get you to the number one position for an extremely competitive keyword, they’re lying. No SEO company in the world can promise that, and if they could, they could make millions just getting their own listings to the number one position.

If they mean they can get you to the number one position for less competitive keywords, it may very well be true. But if they don’t tell you that specifically, then they are being dishonest, because they are trying to trick you into thinking they can get you the number one position for your main keyword. Almost any company can get you to the first page for less competitive keywords, but even they can’t guarantee a specific position.

Also, don’t hire any SEO company that claims you must give them a very high ongoing fee each month to keep you at the top of the search engines. Once you have made it to the top for many of your chosen keyword phrases, it’s very easy to keep your site there by just getting some backlinks to your site each month. You don’t have to pay them hundreds or even thousands of dollars to do this.

Look for a company that has great references that can be verified, is willing to work with you without a massive monthly fee, and seems to give excellent support. If they can’t respond to your questions in a timely fashion before you buy, they aren’t likely to be any faster after you’ve paid them.

Finally, never hire an SEO company that isn’t on the first page of Google for its own main keyword phrases. They don’t have to be on the first page for “SEO”, but if an SEO company based in Seattle doesn’t show up on the first page for “Seattle SEO”, how can you trust them with your own SEO?

Posted by Admin on April 8th, 2010

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Keyword Density

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Keyword Density for SEO Long ago, keyword density was one of the most important factors for determining search engine ranking. All you had to do to gain a top ranking was to repeat your keyword in the meta tags and page content more times than your competitors, and you were almost assured of getting a good ranking.

Of course, this also paved the way for professional search engine spammers to dominate the rankings with useless doorway pages that offered no real value and simply sent visitors off to some affiliate page. Search engines finally found other ways to determine which pages were most relevant, including backlinks, anchor text, and many other factors.

So does keyword density still play any role in ranking? Yes and no. It doesn’t seem that most search engines pay much attention to keyword density for ranking pages. If they do look at it, it doesn’t seem to be given very much weight. But there is one reason why you should pay at least minor attention to the keyword density of your pages.

You see, since spammers used to spend so much time stuffing their pages with excessive instances of their keywords, search engines began to look at the practice as a negative ranking factor. That means that if a particular page exceeds a certain threshold of keyword density, it might be flagged as a potential spam page.

It seems as though one single page on a domain, or perhaps a few, can exceed this threshold without worrying about receiving a penalty. So you don’t have to worry about accidentally exceeding it occasionally. But you definitely want to make sure not to have a high density on every page.

I suggest a keyword density of no greater than 5%. If you go slightly over occasionally you probably don’t have anything to worry about. But if you regularly have pages with 10% keyword density you may run into ranking problems, because your domain might be flagged as spam.

Posted by Admin on April 6th, 2010

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