Backlinks are one of if not the most important things when trying to build links on search engines that lead back to your website. Back links or in the literal sense links back to your website are links that you can create through a variety of avenues to lead people back to your website. Backlinks, as one would assume, can be built all sorts of ways. From something simple like adding a profile on a directory like Yelp to something that takes more time to index like with article marketing. All in all though, the amount of quality and diverse backlinks you have, does matter. Quality = not spamming. Diverse = on various websites with different page ranks and authority types. It used to be that you could just place backlinks everywhere and anywhere and it didn’t matter where or how you got them. But, over the past few years, Google and other engines are cracking down on how you create these links and where they are coming from, because of this, listed below are various sites or rather “ways” to get backlinks. Continue reading “Different Kinds Of Backlinks”
The web is saturated with all sorts of SEO advice and covers many topics which are both white hat and black hat practices. Search engines are updating their algorithms constantly and changes can range from minor, barely noticeable changes to major industry overhauling changes. It’s very important for the SEO specialist to keep up with the most recent changes and make adaptations to keep from being penalized. The updates are really geared towards combating black hat SEO practices but unfortunately sometimes well meaning websites receive penalties. In many cases this is due to using outdated SEO strategies which were effective at one time but are now outdated. There are several SEO practices that are outdated and are now considered to be black hat or bad practices. It’s best to avoid these outdated SEO practices. Continue reading “Paid Links and Other Outdated SEO Practices”
Who hasn’t said, “It’s okay, I’ll Google it.”? This has become the standard response of the day when we do not know the answer to a question. But with literally millions of sites, how do we know Google will come up with the right answer to our question? How does Google find a restaurant or business in our general vicinity when we need one? The web is growing exponentially every day, but how does it come up with the answers to our queries? Continue reading “How Does Google Work?”
Google is constantly being changed to update the way that it sees WebPages. While Google openly talks about their goals of weeding out low quality sites that do not satisfy surfers with good quality content, the algorithms remain shrouded in secrecy. Here is a few of the ways that Google sees your website and how it comes up with the order of the results for related searches.
Educate Yourself
If you do not know how Google sees your website it is hard to improve your organic search ranking. You must educate yourself about search engine spiders and make sure that they can easily navigate your website. They are unable to pick up on more advanced features like JavaScript. WebPages written in HTML that validates, there shouldSEO be no issue in the bots working their way through your website. Continue reading “How Does Google See My Website?”
Natural link building is another way, besides using custom content with integrated keywords, to help your site get a higher rank on search engines. This is a form of off-site search engine optimization that can help you jump up into the spot on Google you want. There are many common ways of building natural links to your website. Here are a few examples of moves you can make to improve your websites natural link building.
How Natural Link Building Works
If someone puts a link to your website or blog because they enjoy your site and want their own readers to enjoy the content as well, this is a natural link. Any site that points visitors toward your website can be considered natural links. Any link that does not involve your input is considered natural. This is not something that happens often, unprovoked. There are a lot of things that you can do to help your website generate some natural links. Continue reading “What is Natural Link Building?”
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can end up being a very confusing topic which can even appear to be contradictory among some of the leading experts in the field. Digital marketing professionals can debate for hours about some of the finer SEO best practices including what works and what doesn’t. SEO comes down to two types of strategies: on page and off page. Basically on page SEO strategies are built into the web design structure and are factors which are used to increase the site’s ranking when the search engine crawlers index the site. Off page SEO are factors which are not located on the page or site but can still be powerful influencers when it comes to ranking in the SERPs.
Blogging and Guest Blogging
Blogs can provide relevant, high quality links back to your site. Using blogs whether you are writing them as an extension of your business or providing a guest post for someone else can help you build relationships with others inside your own niche. Another benefit from blogging includes reaching a larger audience. Maybe you already have a well established blog with some faithful followers. By providing a guest post for another person it can extend this audience beyond your regular readers. Blogs help establish your reputation in your own field as readers soon come to recognize you as a reliable source of information. Blogging helps to increase links back to your site. These are relevant, generic links which search engines will see as adding to the value of your site and help establish you as an online authority.
Social Networking
One of the most effective off page strategies today is to incorporate a social media campaign as part of your SEO strategy. There are the big 4- Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn that are worthwhile for every business to invest time in. But submitting content or your site to other social media sites such as StumbleUpon can also provide essential traffic and valuable back links. Social networking is a very valuable tool when it comes to off page SEO. Just remember that it is imperative to share, converse and interact on the social sites in order for them to be effective at helping to improve your site’s ranking in the SERPs. Some of the social signals that can help affect search engine rankings include:
Number and Quality of social shares
Authority of the social community sharing the URL or content
Social signals coming from the site itself
Activity, interactions and following of the site’s brand on social pages
White Hat Link Building
One of the things that the search engines look at when ranking a page is the inbound links. They want to see that they are generic, unsolicited, and relevant. Your site will incur a penalty if links are obtained in unethical ways which has led to some confusion about this off page strategy and many have abandoned gathering links altogether to avoid penalties. It is imperative to monitor your links and make sure that they are high quality. Here are some questions to help you identify good links:
Is the page or site relevant to my business or what I do?
Does this site have low quality outbound links?
Is the site going to help send the right type of traffic to my site?
Does this page or site rank well in the SERPs?
Does the site have numerous links from other sites?
It is important how other sites link to yours. Sites that use “rel=nofollow” tags or that use a redirect to link to your site will not be beneficial. Search engines will also evaluate the text that is linking to your site. Despite its complexity, link building strategies are still a valuable off page SEO strategy.
Keeping up with a blog or a website can keep a person very busy. Developing high quality content and following all the SEO best practices are just part of the worry that an individual has to bear, not to mention how to get it ranked high in the search engine result pages (SERP). It’s important to maintain a blog or site for an established audience; but it is equally important to get it listed in the top slots of the SERPs so that more people can find it. That’s just good business. There trouble is that just about the time it is all up and running Google releases a new update like Penguin and it’s back to the drawing board.
What is Google Penguin?
Having an online presence is essential for the successful business of today. Google Penguin is really a process used to penalize black hatters who abuse the system in order to gain the advantage and manipulate the search engines into ranking their sites higher in the SERPs. Penguin is really an attempt by Google to clean up the search algorithm and reduce spam as well as site rankings that are from “questionable” sites or irrelevant because they manipulated the system to get located in the coveted 3 slots. It really aims at penalizing those who use “black hat” SEO methods like keyword stuffing, link building schemes, spamdexing, or duplicate content as well as the multitude of techniques used by some SEO companies in order to help clients gain exposure on line. Continue reading “What is Google Penguin?”
One of the first questions an SEO specialist is likely to ask a potential or future client is if they have a blog or not. Content writing is one of the most intrinsic components of developing an SEO campaign today and many are finding that maintaining a blog is one of the best methods to generate fresh content and generic links for their site. The search engines will rank every web page and each post on a blog is an extra web page that can be indexed. This gives even more opportunities to target the main keywords as well as using some of the coveted long tail keyword variations. Not only does a blog help provide content which can be indexed by search engines, it can also help establish you as a knowledgeable authority in your industry. Blogs can be a major component of a social media campaign. This proves that content can be and should be promoted using social media platforms. But then of course it is important to note that not all blogs are created equal. What should a blog have to be a huge contributor to an SEO campaign?
A Professional Look
Of course SEO is more about the written content that a blog contains than about the appearance of the page. But remember that your goal in maintaining a blog is not simply to please the search engines; you do have human readers after all. When designing the blog it is important to remember that the reader will evaluate the blog by what they see when they land on the page quicker than what they will read. Actually, it the page is disorganized and the layout is difficult to navigate it is likely that they will not read the blog at all. Using a free template will create a better appearance for the blog but it is far better to have a professional design it and customize it for your brand. Continue reading “Blogging for SEO”
Follow
