As we all know, link building is the bulk of true SEO and one of the most important aspects for authority in Google’s eyes.  There have been many common practices for building link popularity over the years such as directory submissions, sending out optimized press releases, blog and forum posts with links, paid links, etc.  Most of these are a good support element but won’t take your SEO to the next level.  True link building takes time and real effort because it starts with developing great content, being involved in respected organizations, and attending events.  These five tips require more time and work, but will result in “real” links that will improve your search engine optimization strategies.

1. Develop Great Content – This can come in the form of articles, white papers, blogs, or videos.  The point is that it needs to be compelling and informative enough for people to share and distribute it.
2. Distribute Your Content – This is where social media can come into play.  Having good content is one thing but unless you already have a ton of traffic, you need to proactively get it out there.  It is recommended to have a blog and submit it to blog directories.  Utilized social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to distribute content.  If you have videos, get them on YouTube.  Use a “Share This” social media tool bar to allow people to easily submit content to sites like Digg and Technorati.
3. Leverage Your Partnerships and Associations – Link building can have a bit of business development involved so you need to get out there and lobby for some links.  For example, ask for a link on websites of companies that you have business relationships with.  It is optimal to have this on a page with a decent PR and have some supporting content.  If you are involved in any trade associations, ask if they offer links to the companies involved.  Attend trade shows and speak on panels.  Most of the time there are interviews and videos that you can leverage to gain some extra link juice. 
4. Offer FREE Services – You can discount your services or do some FREE consulting in exchange for a good link.  Depending on the value you provide its not much to ask for and costs the partner nothing.
5. Being Involved in Your Community – This strategy can be executed in many different ways.  Your company should get involved in charities, attend events, etc.  You could also throw a cocktail party and give a FREE seminar about Internet Marketing or Legal Advice for example.  Ask the attendies to blog about it of they feel compelled to.  Make sure not to forget the link!

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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Many companies forget how powerful having a press release strategy can be.  Yes, I said press release “strategy”.  Most companies understand why press releases are important and how to send them out, but many still don’t understand what a powerful compliment this can be to your Internet marketing strategy.  Press releases are important for many reasons but essentially it is a free or inexpensive way to get valuable content about your company out on the web.  These is no sales pitch and the information must be newsworthy and well-written so you are usually ensured that you will be providing some kind of value for the reader.  As a component of an Internet marketing effort, press releases can provide great value.

Three Key Benefits to Press Releases:

1. A press release is a great way to blast valuable information about a company and its products, services, promotions, new hires, charitible donations, etc.  It is essentially free publicity.  Many PR firms do this for clients but most fall short in a few areas on the strategy (by no optimizing the content for search engine purposes, explained below).  As a PR element, a press release is free information for the consumer without the annoying sales pitch.  Sounds kind of like social media doesn’t it.
2. This is also a great way to gain further credibility and provide your audience with subtle messages about how great your company/product/service is.  A well-written press release will have all of the basic components including a good captivating introduction that echoes the message in the title, support paragraphs, quotes from executives or happy clients, and an “About” paragraph explaining the company mission/history.
3. The third and most important benefit is the impact it can have on search results (search engine optimization).  The impact is two fold:  First, a well optimized press release can appear in the SERPs for related search terms and in Google News results for similar keywords related to the content.  I will explain how to optimize a press release later, but once you have this done, you can use resources like PRWeb.com to blast your release out to many different news channels.  When the relase is picked up and distributed to other news sites it can be a great way to receive powerful inbound links to your website.  The more quality inbound links your site has, the more likely you are to achieve better rankings (assuming your website is well-optimized).

Three Tips for Creating a Good Press Release Strategy:

1. Make a committment to writing regular press releases, optimizing them, and sending them out through PR distribution channels on the web.  This is also great content to post on your website as well. Create a news section and upload the releases there as well.  The difficult part in doing regular press releases is that you have to find something newsworthy to write about each time…so get creative.  You will quickly find out what will be accepted and what won’t by the distribution channels such as PRWeb.com
2. Optimize the press release buy including important keywords in the content.  Take a couple keywords and use them as anchor text to hyper link back to key pages on your site.  Write a proper title and description for the release as well.  Sites like PRWeb.com have the tools to accomplish this.  Once the press release has been uploaded and optimized, then you submit it for review.  The editors will either approve the release and schedule it for distruibution, or they will deny it and tell you what needs to be fixed.  Usually, to send an optimized release there is now a small fee but it can be well worth the benefit.
3. The third tip as mentioned above is to add the press release content to your website as well in a News or Resources section.  Make sure to proof read all content of course.  You would be surprized how many press release still have typos and poor grammatical structure.

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.

There are many factors that go into a healthy SEO campaign. If you work with a good internet marketing company that uses the correct tactics, two of the most important factors in your SEO campaign will be increasing the number of pages on your site and increasing the number of links that Google recognizes. There is a simple test you can run to see how many pages Google has indexed and how many links they recognize. Go to the Google search bar and type in:

site:yourwebsite.com (The will show you how many pages have been indexed_

link:yourwebsite.com (This will show you how many links are recognized by Google.

This test will also work with Yahoo as well. If you are trying to rank for a certain keyword, look at all the sites on the first page of Google and run these tests on those sites. You will have to get more links and more pages than some of those sites to rank on the first page. The best way to grow pages is with good new content and new blog posts. Using Word Press or other blog software, every new blog you write will act as a new page that Google indexes on your site. When you are growing links, you must do it organically. This means you should write on other blogs, issue press releases, and create online press for your website. Do not trade links with other sites: this practice is frowned upon by Google.

Increase your pages and increase your links in a slow and healthy fashion and you will have a solid SEO campaign. These are only two important features out of many, so check with your Internet marketing company and make sure you are following the right SEO practices.

-Brandon

The grand old question in SEO remains,”How long is Google’s aging filter and how do you get around it?” This can also be called the Google Sandbox. In my opinion the aging filter was created to prevent new sites from spamming and building thousands of links in one month to get to the top of Google. Google ranks organically by relevancy, and this ensures that only the most relevant sites stay on top. For a domain that is less than one year old it appears that the aging filter may be a bit longer. It could be six months, eight months, or even twelve months in some cases. For a site that has existed already for several years, the aging filter appears to only be about three or four months. This is one of the reasons it is much harder to rank quickly on Google for a brand new domain name. When you get a new link to your website, Google will take months to recognize that link, and then it filters out a large majority of the links, which is why it is so hard to build new links in Google. Yahoo and MSN have less strict link practices so it is easier to rank quickly in those search engines.

If you choose to cheat Google and try to find ways around the aging filter you will be caught and penalized. Google has about 50 different kind of penalties, and if you get one of them it is difficult to get the penalty taken off. I recommend using a professional Internet Marketing Company or an SEO company to work on the SEO of your website. If you try to beat Google by yourself, you will get caught, and you will not be happy with the outcome. Remember- you may be smart, but the people at Google are always one step ahead of you.

The aging filter is also known as the Google Sandbox.  Google updates their algorithim frequently so no one knows the true rules of the sandbox but Internet Marketing companies likes us try to figure it out all day long. The best thing you can do to not piss off Google is to build links organically and naturally through blogs, forums, and social networking sites. Do not try to add hundreds of links at a time and do not join link farms. They are illegal and they will get you heavily penalized.  Stay away from the Sandbox if you can.

-Brandon

Major search engines like Yahoo and MSN have fallen behind the usurping Google search engine due to an ingenious design that has won acclaim for returning the most reputable and relevant results. Those last two adjectives describe the design of the complex algorithms that make up Google search and the subject of this blog is a major tactic Google uses to identify a website as such. Link building can consist of strategic alliances with other websites to social media to pay-per-post networks. It is one of the most significant aspects of your internet marketing campaign; as a successful, ongoing strategy is necessary to bring your site to the top search results of Google.

A specialized internet marketing firm can provide you with an optimal link building strategy by conducting an in-depth analysis of your company’s online presence and the environment it is in. Evaluating competition and potential linking partners are main components of the analysis. You need to know how well linked your competition is, where they link from, and how you compare. Identifying linking partners can be complex in that you need to analyze such factors as the age of domain, uniqueness of content, and potential for incoming traffic. Bringing on a professional internet marketing firm can accomplish your online marketing goals in a cost-effective manner and deliver volume to your site that will increase exponentially as you rank higher and higher in Google search.