How often should you link build
27/5/2009 1:48
Always, is the short answer? Link building shouldn’t be a stop and start exercise. Your link building efforts no matter what the scale should be continuous and consistent. This doesn’t mean that spurts of links are not effective when implemented correctly, but 500 new links or book marks in one day and then nothing for 12 months will be very obvious to search engines that actively look for such linking / bookmark patterns. Such patterns are quickly identified and will be simply discounted or removed.
What we say to many clients is that link building is not just about creating links to your site, its about getting your name out there and establishing business to business relationships with other businesses. Often an affiliation with other websites will bring much more than the just page rank link juice you seek to attain but targeted traffic to your site.
The link juice is however an important factor and establishing links especially one way from authority sites is crucial for maintaining high search engine placement. For more information on this, please refer to our previous blog post about how to attain authority one way links.
So link building should be an on-going exercise that you or a member of your business performs on a regular basis. Link building when performed correctly is time consuming and often de-motivating especially for new sites with no authority. Why not outsource your link building to us. Following a review of your website and your business goals, we can formulate a link building strategy adopting a wide mix of techniques that will drip feed links to your site over an agreed timescale. This is most effective way of attaining or maintaining a leading position on the search engines.
Please take a look at our Off-Site search engine optimisation services and contact us if you would require a bespoke link building strategy designed.
Guaranteed Rankings & First Page Placement
20/5/2009 3:35
In a word No, and anybody using white hat techniques should tell you the same. In our experience guaranteed first page placement from SEO firms often promotes Black Hat SEO. i.e. quick wins to get you ranked for the sole purpose of getting paid.
Getting on the first page of Google is not a difficult task when un-restricting techniques. Maintaining rank and high search engine position is the challenge and what you should be aiming to achieve. Don’t ever be tempted by the quick wins and promises. You may see results, but they will most probably be temporary and could result in your site being penalised and even suspended from Google’s and other leading search engines results pages.
It is fair to say that an established site that has not yet been optimised and operates in a low competition industry can be as close as you can get to a guaranteed result from our perspective. But here at the SEO-Authority, we still wouldn’t guarantee it. Why, Not confident enough? No. But a guarantee is a cast iron statement. Unless you have overall control of every competitor, every Google update and even the site that we are optimising, how can you offer this? So we don’t! No matter how sure we may be.
Google algorithms that determine website search engine placement are ever changing to ensure nobody; including SEO specialists can make such a guarantee. For info Google applied algorithm 450 changes last year. If Google lose the upper hand and control then it would start a downwards spiral for Google as we know it.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t master the field of SEO but it is a living formula and array of techniques as Google makes a point of changing things to protect their business and to keep everyone on their toes. This where the firms like the SEO-Authority add real value, as our teams are continually researching new techniques and validating existing techniques to ensure we can offer the most effective solutions to our clients.
Every online business may be different but all share a common goal which is attaining top listings on the leading search engines. Don’t get carried away by the flashy marketing, keep your search engine optimisation inline with your business objectives which for 99% of company’s will be for stable, long term growth and performance. The golden rule applies, if it sounds to good to be true then, well you know the rest..
Concerned About Online Reputation
20/5/2009 3:33
More so now then ever, you / your company’s online reputation is a huge factor in maintaining and establishing new business. Whether you have a website or not and even if you don’t trade online, it is essential to ensure your online reputation is portraying the image that you want.
When was the last time you typed your company name into a search engine search? Where you just checking to see that you were placed or did you actually examine all of the references to your company name.
With the increase of social media sites, blogs and forums at an unprecedented rate it is likely that a disgruntled customer, a competitor or in some cases just for the hell of it, someone has written something about your company that is less than flattering. Often all it takes is one or two bad comments to put a potential customer of buying your products and services. Negative reviews always outshine positive ones as human behaviour pushes people to read the bad before the good. It is amazing how much people do believe what they read and base there perceptions upon it.
As mentioned in one of our previous posts, spreading negative company perception is becoming an increasingly used underhand tactic by aggressive competitors.
Combating this problem can be tough especially if someone has a particular grievance against your company and has used a variety of forums to exercise there opinions. If you are not in this predicament now, our advice is why wait for this happen? There are a number of techniques you can employ to ensure that your website and positive references to your site will outrank current or future bad references to your business.
Take a look at our online reputation management services or contact us for me info.
However your current online reputation stands, be armed and ready…
How To Get Authority Links To Your Site
15/5/2009 11:17
So, you have found a few authority sites that often top the search engines for keyword searches relating to your business / industry. It is likely that the authority site will not want to link to the new kid on the block who may even be going into direct competition with them. Why would they, would you?
The authority sites do however link too many other websites for what ever reason, and this is where you target your requests. If you get a link from these sites, the high authority website will still have a positive influence on your own site.
This is what you need to do:
Find a high quality, high authority website (it should be old, have many inbound links and good rankings on Google).
Ask the high authority website for a link to your website. Don’t wait for a response though carry on with the next step.
Perform a link lookup of the authority site. If your not using a toolset simply do this by typing into a Google search ‘link: www.AuthoritySiteNameHere.com’ Visit the websites to which the high authority website links to and ask the webmasters of these sites if they want to link to your site.
If using a toolset to manage your links, a word of advice is NEVER use the default template often provided via the toolset. This very transparent and shows the webmaster you are contacting that you are not that bothered about the site, you just want the link. So you should personalise your message, look at their site, complement were necessary but don’t go over board. Ultimately they know and you know your driver is gain a link but don’t stop there. There are often other avenues of affiliation with a relating site that can be far more valuable to your business than a simple link.
Of course, these second-tier links are not as valuable as links from the top-authority site. However, they are still very valuable and chances are that they are more valuable than many other links that you can get on the Internet.
Go forth and link…..
Building Trust With Leading Search Engines
13/5/2009 23:28
Why is it that some websites can attain high rankings on Google for pretty much any content they publish whilst other websites despite search engine optimisation struggle? It all boils down to TRUST. Trust is a major factor in Google's ranking algorithm
A high trust level is crucial if you want to get high Google rankings
Some websites have managed to reach a very high trust level with Google. That helps them to get higher rankings on search engines than you do.
Why? Google doesn't want to serve spam sites or the unknown in the search results. Google uses this trust factor to protect its core business. It is important to show Google that your website is for real, that you're not a spammer, you are serving informative content and that you plan to stay in business for a long time.
What can I do to gain trust with Google and other leading search engines?
1. Your domain name
The age of a domain is important to Google. When you start a new online business, consider buying an old domain name if a suitable name is available. There are a whole host of domain auctions and resale sites that you can do this through. At the SEO-Authority we can assist with this and have all the necessary accounts in place to seek, buy and transfer a domain you may want. We are also experienced negotiators in the purchasing of existing business domains and selling on behalf of clients.
There are many considerations to be aware of when purchasing expiring or expired domains. As this is a huge area in itself, we will create a new posting for this topic.
Back onto domain trust, make sure that the contact information on your whois record is correct. Do not use exotic top level domains. If you are in the USA, use .com, .net or .org. If you're in another country, use the official top level domain of your country. If your customer base is global consider a .com domain and the top level domain for your country. You can run both independently with different content or simply apply a 301 permanent re-direct from one to the other.
Don't overuse hyphens in your URL. For example, www.keyword-keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4-.com looks spammy. Although the domain name is considered an important ranking factor, with the increase in Google Chrome usage whereby the domain name isn’t displayed in the search results, less emphasis is being placed on this by Google.
2. website content
Make your contact information easy to find on your website. List a full address and not only your email address on your website. The more information about your company can be found on your website, the more likely it is that it will be considered a real business.
Your website should have a privacy policy and terms and conditions (if applicable). Both should be linked from your sitemap.
Don't use doorway pages. They annoy search engine spiders not to mention website visitors. Doorway pages are a clear indicator of a low quality website and Google will not reward you with high rankings medium to long term.
If possible, keep the HTML code of your web pages below as small as possible so that search engine spiders can crawl it easily. Regularly update your web pages to show Google that your website is alive and serving fresh content
3. Inbound links
Do not participate in automated linking schemes. Keep your linking patterns as natural as possible. If your website gets 1000 inbound links on a single day and then nothing more, this may be considered by Google as paid links and an attempt to trick the search engines. All of the SEO-Authority links building packages are spread across a number of months for this very reason.
The links to your website should contain your keywords but they should not all contain exactly the same link text. If all links to your website used exactly the same link text then this would be a red flag for Google. Create fresh new anchor text for your link partners to display.
Do not advertise the sale or purchase of paid links. This is strictly against Google guidelines and you will be penalised if flagged up. No matter how under the radar you think your paid links may be, just consider how aggressive your industry is. Do you trust your competitors enough not to blow the whistle on you? Yes this happens, more often than you think too. Business is business at the end of the day why wouldn’t your competitor go telling tales to Google if they thought you were gaining competitive advantage over them using such techniques.
Linking is not just confined to website ‘A’ linking to your website. You must also consider when researching link partners who links to them. If website ‘A’ has 1000 links pointing to it from porn, hate, illegal, spam and generally low quality sites that have no relation to your industry, then that link from Site ‘A’ to your website carry’s little value. Although Google don’t advertise this fact, it can actually be damaging to your ranking. As part of our SEO audit and analysis we perform a bad neighbourhood link check to against this very problem.
In summary, trust comes with time but also following best practice techniques for your website content and managing as much as possible references to your business on the World Wide Web. If you are concerned by bad, false references to your company name or website please take a moment to explore our online reputation service.
