Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are constantly changing as we chase the SE’s latest algorithms and try to keep up with what Google wants from us.  As search engine marketers, we have to always be on top of the best practices and guidelines in order to properly serve our clients and ensure that the strategies used are sound. 

The greatest part about SEO these days is that its less about repetitive activity (though that is still a big part of it) and more like business development (in my opinion).  SEO has become more and more natural and it all starts with adding real value to the web by creating a site with good content.  These days good content can and should come in the form of all kinds of media:  blogs, articles, video, podcasts, etc.  The SE’s are giving rankings to sites that really have that “wow” factor when it comes to valuable unique content. 

All of the basic rules still apply and things like having good site structure/site maps, unique content, and solid link building strategies are the foundation of any good SEO effort.  The on-page portion is of course all about continually adding fresh content for your users (content that is relevant and hopefull educational).  The off-page portion has become the mosty important ongoing effort in the form of link building.

Link popularity is about building solid inbound links from relevant websites.  The more quality links you have the more “votes” of assurance Google will notice and the rankings will follow.  The days of link trading and link farms are over as we all know.  Follow those practices or any unnatural method for building links and you could find yourself sitting on the search engine sidelines for a long time. 

Below are some initial steps to beginning your link building effort:

• Build a healthy content rich website that adds value to your online community
• Submit your site to all the top directories
• Purchase key “paid” links
• Always SEO optimize your press releases before sending

The rest of your link building effort is where it gets tricking and time consuming.  As stated above, the best link building strategies are natural and well planned.  Use some of the steps below to get started once you have completed the steps above:

• Run Google searches using your targeted keywords
• Find sites that are relevant and similar but not competing
• Call or email the webmaster and formall request that they link to your site
• Offer reasons and benefits (consider offering to link to them as well but don’t over do the “link trading”)
• If you have other websites with related material or partner companies, make sure they are linking to your website
• Use anchor text when setting up the links and try to have the link coming from the home page or other powerful pages on their website
• Set up a blog and contribute to other people’s blogs – once you are a trusted source you can start throwing some links in as long as they are relevant and the page on your site you are linking to offers additonal value to the reader

The key to these efforts is that you simply have to commit the time to do it.  Google will usually only recognize a fraction of the links you build so make sure you are going after quality, not quantity.

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A very important part of our SEO strategy is linking. The inbound links play an important role too but these are definitely not the only important links. Wikipedia defines an internal link as: a hyperlink that is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on or part of the same website or domain of the internet. Why not take it directly from the best source out there – Wikipedia the epitome of internal linking.

Here are some of the reasons why internal linking is so important:

• To insure that your website gets properly crawled these links make it easy for the search engines to crawl a website and this also makes sure that all pages can be correctly found and identified by the search engines.
• Adding a text link builds the relevancy of a page to a specific keyword phrase. For instance tying the keyword chocolate chip cookie to a page that contains a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
• Inner linking all pages on your website will increase the probability that these pages internal pages get ranked in the search engines and will increase the PageRank of an internal pages

Linking your pages makes sure that every page of your website is able to be found by the search engine spiders. Internal linking is very easy to do through a CMS editor so this is an easy step you can take to optimize your website. Internal Linking if done correctly can increase the number of pages that a search engine ranks your site for, it can also increase the number of keyword phrases that your website can rank for in the search engines.  Internal linking sets the proper foundation for a good orgain search engine optimization campaign.

Don’t blindly add links to each page!

There is a process that you need to follow when you are optimizing your website, so don’t just start adding links to all of your internal pages.

First and foremost: You need to add title tags, meta descriptions and meta keywords to each and every one of your pages. All of this information that you are adding to each page has to be specific to that particular page. For instance on a page talking about how to bake chocolate chip cookies you need to add metadata coherent to chocolate chip cookies and not about roasting chickens. Adding the correct meta data to each and every page will tell the search engines to rank that specific page about chocolate chip cookies for the keywords chocolate chip cookies. To build upon this and to validate this keyword to that specific page you want to create internal links from other pages to the chocolate chip cookie page. For example on the roasting chicken page you can have a paragraph about how chocolate chip cookies are a great dessert after such a great chicken meal. Here is where you will hyperlink this text “chocolate chip cookie” to the page about how to cook these. This gives a point or vote to this particular page for that particular keyword.

For the most part your homepage will target your most competitive keywords and phrases and your internal pages will focus on targeting less competitive phrases. When creating internal link on your homepage you will want to keep in mind which keywords you want to rank for first because the links on your homepage are seen as more relevant the closer you are to your homepage. Be careful to not overload all of your pages with internal linking and try to keep it to 3-4 per page.

Social media marketing and PR strategies are growing like wild fire. Social media platforms can be very effective for PR efforts, brand exposure as well as the more technical side to link building for orgainc search engine placements. Organic search engine optimization has many components and as the search engines get smarter, the tactics used by any good SEO company must be ever-evolving.

The traditional linking building methods used to be fairly limited, not-withstanding the SPAM tactics like link tading and link farming. Now, with the social media phenomenon, SEO consultants and marketers can use these outlets as strategies for effective PR and link building. Many times the strategy is to generate good enough content with enough value to make your way to the home page of Digg or Reddit. The result is a lot of extra exposure, traffic, and links. As other bloggers pick it up and write about the content, this can result in additional exposure and links. User generated content sites such as blogs and forums are the fastest growing web platforms out there which is why marketers use it for Internet marketing campaigns.

When we talk specifically about social media signals we are referring to the user-generated content such as comments, feeeback, ratings, etc. Take YouTube.com for example…the largest vertical search engine on the web. YouTube.com weighs social media factors very heavily when ranking videos in their results. The more views, votes, ratings, and comments, the more likely a video will appear high in the results when people search for content relevant to that video. Much in the same way, these videos when posted on other websites add value to that sites rankings.

So the question remains, will social media signals start to out-weigh traditional SEO signals like quality content, and high quality inbound links?

Probably not but it will definitely compliment it! This is why social media is such an important part of any well rounded search engine optimization campaign. The two strategies are often seen as separate, but there are definitely imporant social elements required in SEO for effective link building. Social media as a full comprehensive strategy is of course much more involved and takes a lot of research prior to launching to be effective. Marketers must understand the demographic they are targeting first, then learn how to find them through social outlets. Once this is done, the campaign can begin. You must of course remember to be sensitive to the rules of the community and add value.

Social media marketing should also be creative and specific to the goals of the campaign. Every social media campaign should be different…there is no canned response for this kind of Internet marketing.

Companies have been sending out press releases for over 100 years, but very few companies actually optimize their press release for the search engines. By embedding keywords into properly written press releases it can have a huge positive impact on your search engine rankings. If for example one of our clients www.newcondosonline.com is sending out a release on the San Diego Condo market, the term “San Diego Condo” should be coded and linked within the release to go back to the San Diego Condo page of www.newcondosonline.com. By doing this, each time a blogger or media outlet picks up the release they have a much stronger chance of linking back to the site and creating a positive SEO impact. You can only have about 1 coded link per every 100 words in the press release or it will be seen as spam.

We use prweb for almost every release because they have a huge reach and their press releases are always accepted by Google News. Pr Newswire is another very popular one. There are new sites popping up each week as I just read about onlineprnews.com which offeres SEO optimized releases for only $6 while some of the other sites are $200 to $400 for each release.

I reccomend you consult with your current Internet Marketing Company to make sure that all of your future press releases can undergo SEO work before they are sent out. Many existing public relations firms do not know how to do this and they don’t do it which is why it is very important to use a skilled Internet Marketing firm to help you get this done properly.

-Brandon

Any good search engine optimization company will include a link building aspect to every SEO campaign.  SEO strategies involve optimizing site structure, unique content, internal linking, and building solid inbound links.  All of these components must be crafted utilizing best practices so the search engines “know” that your site is relevant, valuable, and trustworthy.  Missing any piece of the overall SEO strategy can keep your site from acheiving page one rankings.  One of the most important ongoing pieces of the campaign is to continually and natually build good inbound links to your website.

Before we go any further let’s do a quick review of the definitions and go over WHAT links are:

Internal Links:  links within a website (basic navigation from page to page)

Inbound Link:  links coming in to your website from another URL

Outbound Links:  links from your site to another URL

External Links:  links between different URLs

Now that we have established the basic definitions, let’s focus on inbound links.  All of these are important but one of the key factors when the search engines are reviewing your site and deciding whether to give you good rankings for your search terms, is the number and quality of inbound links.

So WHY is this important for search engine optimization?

Search engines will define a site as more relevant, valuable, and trustworthy if the site has a good number of links from other reputible sites.  The number of links necessary for rankings depends and the competitiveness of the keywords and the other sites you are competing against.  Both quantity and quality are important but any good SEO company or Internet marketing firm would prefer 10 great links over 100 poor inbound links.  The search engines will review the quality and number of your inbound links and where they link to your website.  Generally, most of the links a site has coming in go to the home page.  It is even more effective if a site has inbound links going to many different pages within the site because this tells the search engines that the site has many different pages of content that are valuable.  They search engines will do a quick evaluation of the site linking to your site and may look at the content on your page as well.

Many times the actual anchor text for the link provides enough “content” for that page in order for the search engines to deem the link as valuable (usually this happens when the anchor text uses your proper keywords and is from a site with a high page rank).  For example, if you have a page in your site about new condos in downtown Dallas and that page has an inbound link from a reputible site using the anchor text “new condos in downtown Dallas” you are off to a great start!

So WHEN does a site build links and how quickly should this process be pursued?

A professional search engine optimization company will do this process gradually and naturally.  The days of link farming and link trading (reciprocal links) are over…in short, no more short cuts!  The best practice for link building is the good old fashion way.  Much of this is done through social platforms, article submissions, press releases, blogs, forum posts, directories, etc.  We can go into the details of each of these later but the lesson to take away from this is that natural link building is the only way to go.

So how do you define “natural” methods?

Natural link building takes time.  If the search engines see a nice steady upward progress in the number and quality of your links, they will assign better rankings over time.  Unnatural link building may be defined as a rapid or drammatic increase in links in a short period of time, sites that link to one another (or link trading) or unqualified paid links (this does not include legitimate advertising or directories).

OK, so you are ready to start link building.  HOW do you define what the good links are?

Generally companies will outsouce this to an Internet marketing company or SEO firm but you should know the basics so you can understand the process.  There are many tools out there to assess what the proper links would be for a certain campaign (varies depending on keywords targeted).  The best and most used tools are usually Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Page Rank, sites like Compete.com or Alexa.com that show traffic levels and give rankings, Digg, Technorati, etc.  Other things to consider when assessing value are the age of the domain and possibly seeking links from government or school websites (.gov sites are very valuable).

The best way to attack this process is with an experienced link building team beacuse it can take time and man power.  Yahoo is much quicker to recognize links than Google so keep in mind that you can check this throughout the process.  For example, a quick way to see how many inbound links Google is recognizing for your site is to type “site:domainname.com” into the Google search box.  The top right portion of the page will give you the number if links recognized.  The bottom line is that to keep improving your rankings, this is a never ending process…so stay at it!

Any good Internet marketing company or SEO consultant knows that link building is a crucial ongoing piece of the search engine optimization (SE0) puzzle.  In fact, once the site has been optimized and all the initial SEO work is done, all that is really left is continuing to add valuable content and building the volume of good imbound links from sites with high page ranks. Of course, there are other ongoing maintenance issues and R&D to be done to stay current with the algorithms, but those are the basic tasks.

Link building strategy has changed a lot over the past few years so Internet marketing professionals need to remember the things to avoid:

• No link trading
• No link farming
• No spamming

The best ways for building links are natural and give value to your site and others.  Submitting the site to directories is usually the first step.  Make sure good titles are used that are relevant to the directories and proper categories are used. Some directories also have featured permanent link placements that you can pay for.

Issue optimized press releases through sites like PR Web.  It is very important to note that the press release must be “optimized” for it to provide good SEO value to your site.  What does that mean?  First, the press release must be relevant and newsworthy.  Second, it must use proper keywords and hyperlinks to your site.  Issuing a couple good press releases per month is a great way to build links as the articles are picked up by many major news sites and can appear in the SERPs as well for your major keywords.

Social networks are another great strategy for building solid inbound links.  Utilizing online communities with blogs and forums are a great example of this.  This is also used when performing social media optimization but we’ll get to that in another blog.  Again, keep in mind that the blogs (much like the press releases) must add value to that particluar community for it to be seen as relevant and for other bloggers to write about it or make comments.

Submit your articles or blogs to RSS direcoties like Technorati.  This is a great way to get them indexed and picked up by the major search engines.  Other great ways to get sites linking to yours is to get involved with charities, make donations, sponsor events, and try to get links from business partners, clients, or other service providers.

There are many creative ways to build links but it must be done naturally without cutting corners or spamming.  Using an Internet marketing company with a solid link building team that specializes in this is a great start.