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Posts Tagged ‘links’
Monday, January 2nd, 2012
If you look at several websites, you will see different links that will take you to related content. This is a great way to pull your website into the related content. How do you do it? It’s actually quite simple and you will be amazed at why you have not used links more.
There are a lot of different techniques but the main one is using document sharing sites. On document sharing sites like Scribd, you can upload your documents into a pdf file. They can then be distributed all over the Internet. Create links in the document back to your website. This increases your chances of getting found in the search engines.
At the same time, you can also search for relevant content to add to your website. This is a great way of sharing information and using various ways of getting back to your site.
It’s also important to link to previous content within your own website. You may have written an article or something a couple of years ago. But it is still relevant and will get readers to read that as will.
Link building or link marketing has been around for a while but it is still a very resourceful tool for your online business. You can always visit with consultants to find out which link building technique or sites that are best suited to your needs.
One thing to remember, where you get back links is more important than what you do. Be sure to use multiple sources to get the best exposure.
Tags: content, internet marketing, link building, links, online marketing, small business
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 5 Comments »
Saturday, December 10th, 2011
How many times have we all gone to a website only to have a dozen things flying off the page at you or taking over your screen and you inadvertently click on something wrong? It happens a lot. A lot of people do not like these fly-in pages.
Not everyone is computer savvy and many people don’t even know what those pages are. Users want a clean, simple and user-friendly site. That will clearly state what the website is about and list some of the items that may be for sale if it is an e-commerce website.
Navigation is also key. Have clear, easy-to-read links to other pages within your website. This way, viewers can easily navigate from one page to the next. It is also important to make sure you have a clear place for reader comments. Be sure to read them and answer them. They may very well be a question about something they want to buy or maybe a suggestion about something. Interaction with online customers is just as important as face-to-face customers.
Making sure your links are working properly in addition to working shopping carts. This is the single most aggravating thing for a viewer. They have gone through the process, get to check out and the shopping cart is empty. Instead of going back and doing it again, they will just leave the site. You have then lost a sale. Another thing no one will wait on is page loading times. If your pages load too slowly because of the graphics, people will leave.
Take some time to visit your website and see what your visitors see. You will be able to determine where you need improvement.
Tags: internet marketing, link building, links, website, website development
Posted in website development | 4 Comments »
Friday, October 7th, 2011
Google+ just seems to keep getting more and more popular. But should we consider it content marketing?
That’s an interesting question and it really gets to the heart of what exactly is content marketing. So let’s answer that question.
Content marketing goes beyond your own Web properties. When you build a web page for your website, that’s content marketing. When you write a blog post for your blog, that’s content marketing. But is that all there is to it? In a word, no.
Content marketing is any effort you undertake to draw attention to your content, your products, your services, or your brand. In that regard then, links can themselves be a form of content marketing. Social media is a form of content marketing.
That extends the concept into farther reaches. When you put a Like button on your blog, that’s a kind of content marketing. It allows your readers to show their approval or their affinity for your content through their own social media profile on Facebook. As a result, your content gets pushed farther that it could or would otherwise.
Google+ operates on the same concept. You write a blog post and share it on Google+. That content has the potential to go places that it wouldn’t go by virtue of your extended network on Google+.
When you think of content marketing, you have to think about it terms of its full potential. Don’t get sidetracked into thinking it’s only what you produce on your Web properties.
Tags: content marketing, google, links, website
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 6 Comments »
Saturday, September 17th, 2011
You’d think that SEO is some kind of magic if you listen to some professionals in this field. Only an expert SEO can do this. Watch Ma, no hands!
The truth is, SEO is no voodoo science. There’s no magic bullet. No magic words you can say to make your pages rank well in the search results. It just takes good old-fashioned hard work.
Of course, there are different ways to get the job done.
Some SEOs swear by their keywords. Others swear by their links. But you need both. Keywords and links.
Usually, SEOs talk about on-page SEO factors and off-page SEO factors. The on-page factors include things like page titles, meta tags, internal links, alt tags, etc. Off-page SEO factors generally are a reference to links.
But even within those two categories, there are a variety of factors that can influence your search rankings. Quality, age of domain, age of link, anchor text, etc. Your job as SEO is to think about all of those factors.
Some SEOs develop a formula. Do they work? Probably, to some extent. But there is no SEO-by-the-numbers routine that works for every web page. You have to understand the principles at work and play up to those. If you do it well, you can make any web page rank respectably.
Tags: keywords, links, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Friday, September 16th, 2011
A very prominent SEO and veteran Internet marketer recently said that keywords are no longer necessary. Just write content, he says. The search engines will rank you.
Is there wisdom in that or is it a bit misguided?
I certainly believe that social media has changed the stakes of the game. You can feasibly build a business model completely around social media marketing, in which case keywords are not necessary. You could promote your content through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Klout, Foursquare, YouTube, and every other social media giant out there and do just fine. No keywords necessary.
But I subscribe to a holistic view of Internet marketing. What I mean by that is, you want to give yourself every bit of an edge that you possibly can – in social media and in the search engines. To succeed at building yourself an edge, keywords are certainly helpful.
Many SEOs proclaim that keywords in titles are helpful to your on-page SEO. I’ll have to agree. That’s been my experience.
The prominent SEO mentioned above says keywords in titles aren’t necessary because it is your inbound links that are pushing you up in the rankings. But I’ve seen pages rank prominently without the links. So, no, I’ll have to say that’s bad advice.
I’m not saying links aren’t necessary. I’m not saying they aren’t helpful. I’m saying links alone are not going to give you the edge. Nor will on-page keyword stuffing. You have to focus on the big picture and that means honing your on-page content with SEO in mind.
Tags: keywords, links, SEO, Social Media
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 6 Comments »
Thursday, June 30th, 2011
When you go about your link building campaigns, do you bother yourself with ensuring your links are varied in nature? That is, do you use the same anchor text all the time or do you strive to create a more diverse link portfolio? The truth is most SEOs only use one primary keyword for their anchor text.
Link diversity means several things. It isn’t all about anchor text. That’s only one part of the equation. The key is to build a link portfolio that looks natural.
Here are some things to think about in your attempts to build a solid link portfolio:
- Use between 10-25 different anchor texts for each web page you are targeting.
- Build your links from a lot of different types of websites (directories, blogs, forums, etc.) within your niche.
- You can also add a few links from outside of your niche if they are natural links.
- Don’t target only high PageRank sites; to build a solid link portfolio, you need links from websites with a varying degree of authority.
- Make sure some of your anchor text targets long tail keyword phrases while others target general phrases within your niche.
- You can also throw in a few non-keyworded links such as “click here” and “go to” links as those represent a different type of call to action.
- Don’t just link to your home page. In fact, most of your inbound links should point to an internal page.
A good link portfolio is diverse. That means targeting different types of websites for your links as well as different anchor texts.
Tags: anchor text, link building, link diversity, links
Posted in link building | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 27th, 2011
If you are new to Internet marketing or website development, or you just simply have stuck to the basics, then you might wonder what a heat map is and how it can help you improve your website and lead to greater revenues. Even increase your ROI.
A heat map, in simple terms, is a graphic picture of your website traffic and what that traffic does on each page of your website.
Represented by colors, a heat map can show you the “hot spots” on each page of your website. It can show you where the most mouse movements occur, which indicates where users’ eyeballs travel, and even which links are clicked on the most. You can then use that information to improve your websites SEO and overall content mix.
Let’s say you discover that on almost all of your pages, the most viewed area of the page is the top right corner. Let’s say that, furthermore, the most clicked link on each page is the banner ad in the top right corner that offers site visitors a free download of your e-book. What does that tell you?
It should tell you that whatever information you provide in that e-book is deemed valuable to your site visitors. It could be a good opportunity to provide more in-depth information about that content. Perhaps it’s time to publish and market a more in-depth e-book on the topic that you can sell to your site visitors and e-mail list.
What if, on the other hand, the most viewed part of your website was the top left corner and the most clicked link on your home page was a link at the bottom of the page that led visitors to your About Us page. What’s that tell you?
If you have links in the top left corner of your home page that are not getting clicked on as much as the links at the bottom of the page, then you probably have something wrong with those links or the content that surrounds them. Maybe you should reword your anchor text. Or maybe the content surrounding the link should do a better job of leading your visitors to take the desired action. Maybe the call to action itself isn’t working.
Heat maps are valuable tools that measure many factors at once. If you are serious about making your website stand out, then you should be using heat maps.
Tags: analytics, content, heat maps, links, SEO
Posted in Tracking & Analytics | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
If you’ve noticed that your competition has passed you in the search results pages and you know that you have a superior product or service, what can you do? Well, there are several things you can do right now to improve your SEO. In just a couple of weeks, you can improve your SEO tremendously.
Here are the top 5 ways to improve your SEO right now.
- Get Verified – All of the search engines have a process for verifying a website. This involves adding an XML Sitemap to your site, allowing your website to be more crawlable.
- Tailor Your Title/Meta Tags – If all of your Title and Meta tags are the same, then you’ve lost the SEO war. Tailor the tags on every page. That one thing alone could make the difference between a search ranking or two.
- Internal Linking Structure – This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. What is the anchor text on your internal links? Are you using title attributes? Fix your internal links before you go looking for inbound links.
- Inbound Link Building – Another thing you need to do is to seek out quality inbound links. This is one of the most talked about SEO tactics online, but one of the least understood. Build quality inbound links and you’ll have staying SEO power.
- Add Fresh Content – The only thing that keeps search engines coming back to your website again and again is fresh content. Update your site often and you’ll see the search engines more often.
Improve your SEO with these 5 strategies. They’re easy to implement, cost little, and can go a long way to making your site more crawlable and indexable.
Tags: content, links, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 13th, 2010
There are things that change about SEO, then there are things that don’t change. For instance, Google has, just in the last year, made some changes to local search that put more emphasis on certain criteria and those changes are designed to make finding local information easier for searchers. However, all search is still primarily based on the two things that it has always been based on: Content and Links.
Content: We’re talking on-page here. Your web pages – a la your website – are important because they contain content that will be ranked against your competitors in the search engines. That content can be helpful to your audience or not, but it will be ranked according to Google’s criteria for the search terms that you are targeting. Content always has been and always will be important for search.
Links: While content is more predictable on your part, links are less so; nevertheless, they are somewhat predictable, and controllable. There are different kinds of links, of course, and you should pay attention to all of them. Three categories of links you need to be familiar with are:
- Inbound links - These are links from other sites that point into yours.
- Internal links – These are links from one page to another within your website.
- Outbound links – These are links pointing from your website to other pages on the Web.
In terms of SEO, these are listed in order of importance. Inbound links are necessary to make sure your site is crawled and to ensure that your web pages are associated with particular key phrases and deemed important for those phrases. Internal links serve the same purpose, but you have got to manage those effectively or they can work against you. Outbound links are good to a lesser degree, but you can get by without them.
When it comes to SEO, some things will never change. I’m banking on content and links being two of those.
Tags: content, links, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Saturday, November 27th, 2010
According to an article in WebProNews, veteran Internet marketer Bruce Clay is predicting that ‘Likes’ will become the new ‘Links’. In other words, search engine algorithms will place a higher priority on social Likes instead of inbound links, but is that good?
In a way, yes. Clay makes a good point when he says that the list of sites that will rank at the top of the search engines will change overnight. He also makes a good point when he says that webmaster priorities will change from building bigger sites to building higher quality websites. But that’s only true on the short term. Long term, it won’t take long before ‘Likes’ get gamed as much as links.
I think Google and Bing already include some social media graphing in their ranking algorithms. How much, exactly, is anybody’s guess. But it’s quite possible that Google, if it could ever get its hands on Facebook data, could make Facebook ‘Likes’ a major part of its algorithm. If that happens, then I think you’ll see a mass shift from chasing links to chasing ‘Likes’. That won’t be good for the Web.
What that will effectively do for search engine optimization is create a circus. Rankings will then go to the websites whose owners can pay for the most ‘Likes’. ‘Likes’ will become currency in the same way that links are currency now, and Google will not be able to police those as effectively as they can now police links. That will be Facebook’s job. But how would Facebook approach it? Based on history, I’d say Facebook could be even more strict on ‘Like’ sellers than Google is on link sellers. Imagine having your profile and/or business page banned from Facebook forever.
Is that the way the Web is headed? I don’t know. If it is, then I say get ready for a ride because things are about to get interesting.
Tags: facebook, google, Likes, links
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 1 Comment »
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