SEO And Great Content Go Hand In Hand
There is a misconception among many search engine optimization specialists that SEO must be a focus of content or the content just isn’t good. The truth is, great content and great SEO compliment each other. They can co-exist without hurting each other.
The key to this SEO philosophy is in the use of keywords and links. Keywords are the fuel in every search engine optimization strategy. You don’t want to overdo it, but you must do it.
What does that mean, exactly?
Keywords are a matter of targeting the right phrases for the right audience. If you are trying to reach people who purchase automobiles, then you have to target the right key phrases that attract automobile buyers. If you sell Ford vehicles specifically, then target your phrases to people who buy Ford vehicles. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?
It is, but you’d be surprised at how many SEOs target the wrong keywords for their audiences.
When it comes to links, you want your links to compliment your keyword phrases. They shouldn’t dominate. Anything in moderation is better than the same thing in overdose. Use links that compliment your keywords by incorporating the keywords into the link anchor text and pointing them to relevant pages on your website. Title attributes can also compliment your anchor text.
By complimentary title attributes, I don’t necessarily mean repeating your anchor text key phrase. I mean use a phrase that compliments it and is a more nuanced way of using your important keywords.
SEO is not a science. It certainly isn’t rocket science. Your first concern should be in creating great content. Make the SEO compliment the content.
Why External Links Are Good
Most SEOs will tell you that the way to boost your rankings in the search engines is to build lots and lots of inbound links. Don’t build external links – those that link out – because they drain your authority juice away. Build your inbound links with great anchor text from relevant high authority websites and you’ll be the golden boy of SEO.
That advice really sucks. I’ll tell you why.
Google has long caught onto the practice of spammy links that follow all the rules of the book. They’ve done changed their algorithms at least a couple of dozen times to prevent those links from helping websites that shouldn’t rank. So do all the crafty link building you can following all the usual rules. It won’t work.
What does work is linking out to other sites within your niche. Don’t worry about draining your authority juice. You probably don’t have any yet.
Rather, consider yourself an authority in your niche and act like it. Would an authority link to a resource off site that would help a reader more than anything else you can post on your own? Of course he would. Then do that. Real authority websites link out promiscuously. They link to websites that are helpful to their readers.
That’s not to say you should link everywhere you can. Be selective about your external links. You don’t want to send your readers to warez sites or sites where they’ll pick up a malicious virus.
Set your standards for excellence based on common sense. Link to sites that add value to your niche for your readers. Become a real authority, not some fake authority based on spammy links that get you nowhere.
5 SEO Tips You Can Do In 5 Minutes
Are you afraid of SEO? You don’t have to be. Some SEO tasks are so easy you can accomplish them in less than 5 minutes. Here are 5 SEO tasks you can perform in 5 minutes or less and improve your website’s SEO by major proportions.
- Write an optimized page title – Your page title is one of the most important SEO elements on the page. Each page should have a unique page title and they should not exceed 80 characters. Keep them short and use your primary keyword for each page.
- Improve your headline - Write a short attention-grabbing headline with your primary keyword in it.
- Your meta description – Each page’s meta description should be less than 150 characters. The search engines use this as the snippet in their search results. Use your primary keyword and summarize the contents of your web page.
- Bookmark your web pages – Social bookmarking can often be a good source of inbound links to your website. It only takes a few seconds to bookmark each web page.
- Create an internal link – Find a page on your website and link to another page using keyword anchor text that is appropriate for the linked-to page.
Each of these SEO tasks takes less than 5 minutes to complete, but each one has the potential to increase your search engine rankings considerably.
Why Your Content Needs Links
Content and links go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or like a hot dog and mustard (or ketchup if you are under 10 years old).
Seriously, building content is one thing. You can write great content and even make it shine for the search engines as you sprinkle it with your favorite keywords, but you’ll find that your best content really takes on a life of its own when it starts to attract links.
Links serve some very important purposes:
- Inbound links are used by search engines to determine the authority of a web page relative to other web pages on the same topic
- Links are a reflection of your brand
- Links can serve as a reputation management tool
- Links are a very important path for traffic to your website
- Links often serve as a clue to website content readers about the nature of the content on a web page being linked to
- Outbound links can be a way to attribute a source upon which your own ideas are based.
Links serve many purposes, but they are important because search engines use links to crawl the web. A web page cannot be crawled by search engine robots – hence, cannot be indexed – unless there are links pointing to it.
When it comes to building your content, don’t just think about the content itself. You should also consider how links – your own as well as any the content itself might attract from somewhere else – can be used to enhance the content and make it more valuable for your audience.
The Dangers Of Using Likes In Place Of Links
Bruce Clay suggests that social media ‘likes’ will become the new ‘links’ when it comes to delivering traffic. There’s a strong possibility he’s right too. Search engines are paying more attention to social media activity and Facebook is now becoming a dominant player when it comes to receiving and delivering traffic.
I can see real dangers in using social media as a voting platform. Social media likes will be no different to the current link-based voting system (and that is all links are – votes). Clay rightfully points out that ‘likes’ will eventually be sold as links are now; the problem is, at present, it can take thousands of links to affect a position in search results. We have also seen businesses uses various forms of bribery to gain likes from followers. One wonders how many likes it will take to make a difference – at present, likes in the high hundreds seem to be sufficient.
As with links, likes will not represent quality. Likes will go to people who have effective social media marketing campaigns, can make offers available that attract likes (or direct bribery), and can produce effective viral campaigns. That last will become the real key. Social is far more powerful than any link-building strategy. Social already has a strong web-like structure so viral campaigns have the capacity to reach a much higher audience at faster speeds than traditional methods.
There are two dangers for many businesses, particularly small businesses. Like it or not, you will have to engage in social media. Furthermore, like it or not, you will need to engage in social media marketing targeted towards ‘likes’ as much as traffic, sales, or product awareness.
Most small business owners are not smart marketers. Where social has provided small business owners with a somewhat level playing field, the future may not be as accommodating. Will ‘likes’ improve the quality of content? In the short term it should, but long term, you have to wonder!
5 Reasons SEO Is A Good Investment
Search engine optimization is one of the most effective online marketing strategies available to businesses trying to do business online. There are plenty of reasons for believing that SEO is a worthwhile activity. Here are five reasons you should employ SEO in your online marketing strategy:
- Any improvements you make to your website for SEO will help the search engines better index and rank your website for the rest of its life;
- A good SEO firm will recommend “best practices” so that you have the best SEO tools and advice at your disposal;
- Any new content you create is yours forever and that content has the potential to bring you new customers from your website every day;
- New links you gain from your efforts will remain and continue to drive traffic and increase your search engine rankings for the life of your website;
- If you get lucky and rank for keywords that you aren’t targeting then that’s a ‘give me’. You don’t pay for those keywords so you can potentially have lots of freebies.
SEO is one of the most cost effective and efficient ways to market your business online. The results are long term and once you find a strategy that works, you can use it on all of your websites.
Is The Perfect Link On The Horizon?
It seems that web surfer habits are going to play a bigger role in determining the value passed along through outgoing links. At least, if Google implements a process outlined in a patent granted to them recently. The king of patent analysis, Bill Slawski, has an interesting in-depth look at this new patent and comes up with some interesting theories and how this will all relate to search engine optimisation.
Although outbound links have always been considered equal by search engines, web designers and web site owners have known differently for a long time. If you want a link to get the maximum exposure and the most click-throughs, you would place it in of your page;s ‘hot zones’, often considered to be the top left of your page’s content – that’s why you frequently find Adsense ads in these positions.
Web site owners also know that links placed in the footer are generally internal, linking to pages devoted to disclosures, policies, and sitemaps; or links to web page designers and hosts. Links in sidebars such as those found in blogrolls are often links to associated web sites, or links to friends and family.
Bill Slawski takes it one step further, observing that:
a link with anchor text that is bigger than a certain size may have a higher probability of being selected than links with anchor text of a smaller size. Links positioned closer to the top of a page may also be more likely to be clicked upon. If the topic of the document being pointed to is related to the topic of the page the link appears upon, it may also have a higher probability of being selected by a visitor to the page.
Whether or not Google takes this on board is another matter. Of course, for all we know they may have already. You can bet there will be a lot of testing undertaken now to determine if it is in effect. In the future it seems that the best link on a page will be one that is a font size higher, perhaps bold, and links to a page that is closely associated to the current page. Place that link near the top left hand side of your page, within related content, and you may well have created the perfect link. It would be nice if it was that easy!
5 Aspects Of SEO You Can’t Ignore
SEO is not just writing content and hoping it gets ranked in the search engines. There is a specific strategy that you should follow to get your pages where you want them so that you can have traffic delivered to your website. Here are 5 aspects of SEO that you cannot ignore and hope that your efforts are working.
- Every SEO campaign should begin with keyword research. If you don’t know what your most important keywords are then you’ll never be successful at SEO.
- Local business listings provide a natural opportunity for most businesses, particularly small businesses that operate within a specific geographic community. Don’t ignore local search. Some of your best opportunities will be right under your nose.
- Link building is a time consuming task, but if you want your web pages to rank highly then it’s a necessary task.
- Before you build links and after you’ve done your keyword research you’ll need to create content. This is the most important aspect of SEO. Do it wrong and you won’t rank for the right keywords. Do it right and you can rank even without links.
- Call it monitoring and reporting, analytics, or metrics. Whatever name you give it, it is significant. You’ll never know if your SEO campaigns are succeeding unless you continue to monitor your progress and track your results.
Start and end your SEO efforts on the right foot. Begin with keyword research and end with tracking and monitoring. But don’t leave out the cream in the middle either.
What Is The Value Of A Link?
Infographics can be helpful or just a sad attempt at link bait. But one thing is for sure, if they are helpful to others then they can helpful to you. This infographic by Vertical Measures illustrates that very well.
What makes this infographic so useful is it’s awesome simplicity. Right away you’ll notice that there are two categories of links based on this graphic. There are PR values and there are link types. The graphic breaks link types down into these categories:
- Content
- Blog/Forum comments
- Purchased
- Reciprocal
- Embedded
- Reclaimed
- Natural
- Requested
But which ones are the most important, or most valued?
This is really subjective, but Vertical Measures ranks them according to two metrics – difficulty and quality. In general, the more difficult it is to obtain a link of a particular type then the higher quality that link will be, which translates into more value for the link builder.
From easiest to most difficult, VM ranks them this way: Content Distribution, Blog and Forum Comments and Purchased Links are easiest to obtain. Next are reciprocal links. The third level of difficulty is populated by social media links, embedded content and reclaimed links. Natural links are the next most difficult to obtain and the most difficult links of all are link requests. This is almost a no-brainer.
From lowest to highest again, quality scores are broken down this way:
- Reciprocal links are in the lowest position (note that they are second level in order of most difficult or easiest to obtain)
- Purchased links and comments are slightly higher quality than reciprocal links
- Distributed content and social media links are next on the quality scale
- Embedded content is a bit higher quality than social media and content distribution links
- Finally, the highest quality links are reclaimed, natural and requested
Notice some slight jumbling in the order but generally following the same parallel between quality and ease of obtaining?
The most interesting part of the value score that I find, however, is the break down of PR values. A PR1 link, for instance, is the equivalent of 11 average links, according to the infographic. That begs the assumption that the PR1 link you get is above average. The question is, What’s average? Would that be a 3 on the quality scale? If so then that would include social media and distributed content links. But some of those types of links can themselves be extraordinary, can’t they?
Vertical Measures places a PR10 link to have the equivalent value of 28,080,881 average links. In other words, get one PR10 link and that could be enough to push you up to a respectable search engine ranking.
Getting the picture yet?
I think the point is to get you thinking about what types of links you should be going after. Personally, I think you should pursue any links you can get. Many Internet marketers in recent years have tried discouraging their clients from chasing reciprocal links because they aren’t valued as highly as one-way links. But the fact is they do carry value. Get a reciprocal link from a PR7 site when your site is a lowly PR4 then that will be a valuable link.
I think you can over think the question. To build a solid link portfolio you need to build diversity into it. That means not focusing on any one particular type of link or link from sites with a high PR. After all, PR1 links carry value too. And some day that PR1 site might become a PR8 site. Your link will still be there.
When it comes to link building, just do it. Do it smartly, but don’t over think it.
A Free Competitive Intelligence Tool You Must Have
Every so often I run across a tool so useful that I have to tell you about it. Such is the case with this free competitive intelligence tool. It’s a tool that gives you a ton of useful information about your competition in a single click. Right at your fingertips. Add your own cliche.
The tool is the SEOQuake toolbar. Here’s what it does for you:
- Tell you the Google PageRank of any web page on the Internet
- Gives you the number of pages indexed in Google for any website online
- Also tells you the number of links pointing to any web page as reported to Google
- Reports the number of pages indexed at Yahoo
- And the number of Yahoo links
- Reports the number of links to any domain as reported to Yahoo
- LinkDomain2 – The number of links reported to a full Yahoo domain, unlike LinkDomain1 (previous bullet point) which reports for a single domain such as a subdomain.
- Shows whether a website is listed in the Yahoo directory
- Reports the number of pages indexed at and links pointing to each page at Bing
- MSN (Bing) LinkDomain and LinkDomain2
- Tells if a website is listed in DMOZ
- Alexa Rank
- Links to Digg, Technorati and Delicious histories for any website
- Link to Whois
- Gives keyword density report
- And a whole lot more
You can also judge the value of your competition’s website with traffic data and monetary value information. There is so much that SEOQuake can tell you about your competition that it’s difficult to NOT recommend it.
The only catch is that it can only be used with Firefox since it is a Firefox add on. And you can add other plug-ins to the add-on such as SEO Toolbar and AdsSpy.
If you want real solid competitive intelligence data then download the SEOQuake toolbar.
Why Internal Links Are Important Too
Test question: Which links are more important (multiple choice):
- a. Outbound links?
- b. Inbound links?
- c. Internal links?
No, it’s not a trick question. The answer is, All of the above. Sorry, that wasn’t an option. You pass by default.
All links serve a purpose. It isn’t merely navigational. Outbound links can send traffic to other websites and cause the people you want to buy your widgets to leave in mass droves. But that’s not what you want, is it? Still, carefully placed outbound links can serve a useful SEO purpose.
Inbound links, too, can benefit you in your search engine optimization goals. As well, internal links can be SEO gold.
In fact, internal links are just as important as inbound links for SEO purposes. Both are better than outbound even though outbound links can be good for SEO. Internal links with the proper anchor text can pass just as much SEO link building juice and inbound links and are easier to get. That’s why an internal navigation structure for your website is the No. 1 link building method for most SEOs. It should be for you too.
Content, Links, Meta Tags – Which SEO Factor Is Most Important?
Content, links, meta tags, keywords … it’s all a sea of confusion, right? Which SEO factor is most important?
Links are important. They build link popularity. Relevance, page authority, anchor text, link age, they’re all important, right? Yes, they are all important. But links are the not the most important thing for SEO. Without at least one inbound link to your website, it won’t get crawled and the search engines won’t index it. But for search engine ranking purposes, links are not the most important SEO factor.
How about meta tags? No. In fact, Google doesn’t even consider meta tags for ranking purposes. Yahoo! and Bing still consider meta tags, but they aren’t the most important ranking criteria.
Is it keyword density? SEOs still talk about keyword density. In fact, keywords get a lot of airplay all around. Keywords in title tags, keywords in alt tags, keywords in anchor text. Yes, they’re all important. Even keyword density, to some degree, is important. But not the most important thing.
Content.
Quality, original content is the most important SEO factor online. There’s a reason “content is king” is the Internet’s chant. It’s not a campaign slogan. It’s reality. Content is the most important SEO factor. Over links. Above keyword density. And higher than meta tags.
Make your content shine and dress it up with great links, meta tags, and keyword considerations. But make your content the king.
How Traffic Can Improve Your Social Media Optimization
One of the factors that Google considers when computing search rankings is traffic – quantity as well as quality. Indeed, quality is perhaps more important than quantity. Sure, a site that gets 100,000 visitors per day may be seen as better than one that gets 10,000 visits per day, but just because you get a lot of visitors doesn’t mean that those visitors value your site. It’s easy to game traffic counts.
Another aspect of traffic comparison is whether or not visitors return to your website. If you have a low percentage of visitors who are return visitors to your website then you may suffer from some quality marks that are hurting you in your rankings. But that’ s not all.
Other aspects of quality traffic include traffic source, time on site, time on page, and bounce rates. I think traffic source is important and will likely become more important and when I say traffic source I’m talking about specific websites and their authority. If you get high quality traffic from a website that is deemed authoritative in the eyes of Google then that counts in your favor. It is conceivable that 10,000 visitors per day where 80% of that traffic comes from high quality, authoritative sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter versus 100,000 low quality visitors from low quality directories and such could give you more search mojo. Remember, quality counts. And I think Google is getting as sophisticated at judging quality traffic as they are at judging quality links.
The takeaway here is to seek quality traffic from high quality, authoritative social media sites, not rinky-dink startups with no reputation.
What Makes Good Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is a process that seems to be getting more and more sophisticated as time goes on. Used to be, a webmaster could toss in a few keywords on the web page, add some meta tags, and all was well. Today, there are more than a couple of hundred ranking factors to consider. And what gets one website high rankings may be completely different for another website. Generally speaking, it’s better to focus on principles than specific techniques.
However, there are some best practices that are, across the board, very effective. Savvy search engine optimizers know that putting your keyword in your title is very effective. They also know that inbound links can make a mediocre site a great one. And your URL is important in many ways as well.
But there are certain factors that today may not be important while being extremely important next year or five years from now. A good search engine optimization specialist should be able to look down the road and predict, with some fair amount of accuracy, where search is headed – and begin to optimize web pages for the future of search as well as for today. You don’t need a crystal ball, just a good handle on the playing field. Can your SEO boast of that?