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Posts Tagged ‘links’
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
What is reciprocal linking? It’s the practice of linking from your site to another site in exchange for a link back from the other site. It’s not a bad practice, but it’s not a particularly good one either.
Reciprocal links used to be valuable links, but not any more. That’s because the search engines value one-way links more. The reason is because an unsolicited one-way link is a greater measure of value than a link that is provided for the sole purpose of receiving a link in return. Here’s a useful analogy:
Let’s say you were attracted to a certain person and wanted to ask that person out on a date. If you approach the individual and ask for a date and they say “Yes, pick me up at 7″ then you feel good because you didn’t have to do anything to get that date. You just asked. But what if the individual said, “Well, if you let me drive your car for a week then I’ll let you take me to dinner.” That wouldn’t exactly make you feel good, would it? You’d think that person was just interested in your car. Right?
So reciprocal links are not as valuable as one-way links. Google actually rewards one-way links more so than reciprocal links. That is, in the search ranking algorithms.
However, all that said, I wouldn’t discourage you from seeking reciprocal links under the right circumstances. If your link partner offers the following benefits then your link exchange might actually pay off well, even if not with increased search rankings:
- High traffic
- Link from relevant web page (web page on the same topic as yours)
- Link has relevant anchor text (the word or phrase used to link to your site)
- In-text link used in a natural way (as opposed to a sidebar or footer link)
- The site linking to you is a respected website in your niche and seen as a voice of authority
- The site linking to you is not a link farm or fall into another category perceived as a negative by search engines or any reasonable person online
Keep in mind that reciprocal links are best if the site you are getting a link from actually passes value to you in ways that make sense for your business. Can it send you lots of traffic? That’s good. Can its endorsement of your site increase your own reputation? That’s good.
Look for the value in any kind of link, reciprocal or not. If it isn’t there then pass on the link.
Tags: links, reciprocal links
Posted in link building | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
Rand Fishkin wrote a great blog post on reputation management. I’m not going to address every point, but I would like to mention just one.
Speaking at events is typically free (other than travel), promotes yourself and your brand, and almost always carries a high quality bio with links.
I can personally attest to this fact. When you are invited to speak as a guest at an event that is related to your niche, either local or on a broader scope, you’ll get reputation credit in many ways and one of those ways is in links that you attract to your web properties and social media profiles.
The most obvious way to gain links is when you have your bio published on the website of the event’s sponsor or host. Most conferences these days have websites of their own. If a conference doesn’t have its own website then it is usually a page on an existing site. Conference information typically includes guest speakers, bios and information about the people speaking at the conference. You’ll get a direct link from the conference speakers’ page.
But beyond that, there are other ways to attract attention. If you give a great presentation you’ll get the attention of people in your audience. After the conference they will look for you online and, assuming you’ve done your SEO well, they’ll find you and if you have a blog then you can typically gain new links from people who liked what you had to say.
You’ll also gain new customers if you have a great presentation. Sometimes you’ll get new business at the conference itself. Other times you may just pass out some brochures or business cards and get new business from that.
Speaking at conferences and other industry events is a good way to attract links and new customers. If your website doesn’t have a speaking engagement page then you might consider adding one.
Tags: links, speaking
Posted in link building | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
There has been a lot of emphasis by Google to include inbound links in its ranking algorithms. But little is ever said of outbound linking. Is it beneficial?
To read Aaron Wall, you wouldn’t think so. But I think it does benefit. Maybe not as much as those coveted one-way inbound links, but they benefit.
I think the problem that Aaron has with the link graph is that the linking game tends to benefit big players with a lot of money more than small business owners like you and me. That just means that we have to get a little bit more creative in how we promote our websites. Truthfully, there’s no shame in getting the lion’s share of your traffic from Bing or Yahoo!
Too many webmasters are chasing after Google like a jock after the prom queen. But Google is just one source of traffic, albeit an important one.
When it comes to outbound links, does Google reward websites for doing it? I think so. I believe it’s included in the ranking algorithm, though I can’t say how much the reward is. I do know that if you link out to authority sites that are relevant and that have no big issues (like warez, spam, etc.) then you’ll be doing yourself a favor to let Google know you associate with those authorities by linking to them. That will work in your favor if these conditions are met:
- You don’t do it too often;
- You don’t do in a spammy sort of way (which isn’t necessarily too often); and
- You link to the right sites with the right anchor text.
Are outbound links as important as one-way inbound links? No. But they can help you in certain ways if you do it well.
Tags: link building, links
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
A few years ago, if you’d have received a link from a .edu or .gov website you’d been told those were “high value” links – worth more than your average .com or .net link. But what about today? Andy Beal questions whether that is true based on a video by Matt Cutts.
Personally, I’ve always wondered. Most small business owners really don’t have a hope of obtaining these links. I mean, a .edu link is a link from a university. What would it take to get a university to link to you. You’d have to have some pretty valuable content for a university to link to you. Maybe that was the thinking behind the theory that those links are higher value links than your run-of-the-mill .coms.
I suppose the same would go for .gov links. But is it true?
I really don’t think it matters. I think the most important thing to remember about links is that if you get a link from a relevant site with a lot of traffic then that is going to benefit you. I really don’t know what other kind of link you’d want.
Tags: .edu, .gov, link building, links
Posted in link building | 4 Comments »
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
If you’ve been around the Web for very long then you might have heard the term “mashup”. What’s it mean?
A mashup, simply put, is the aggregation of content from two or more sources. It usually exists on a single web page, but it can also exist within an application such as a widget or through an RSS feed. Any Web 2.0 technology is capable of integrating into a mashup or presenting a mashup, or both.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you want to integrate your blog with content from another website in your niche owned by a partner firm and an association article directory within the same niche. If you obtain the developer APIs or XML code from the two sources you want to integrate with your blog into a mashup, you can create a brand new way to present all of the content mixed together and present it on all three of your websites or on a completely different website altogether.
So what are the benefits of doing this? The first benefit is increased traffic to the content included in the mashup. By using the content in a new way you may be able to get that content before new eyes and parlay that into increased traffic to each site integrated into the mashup. The second benefit is links. Each mashup links backs to the original content and if that mashup is presented on a separate web page from the original content then it provides back links that search engines use to determine your total search rank value.
Mashups can be fun and they’re fairly easy to develop. They certainly have their benefits.
Tags: content, links, mashups, traffic
Posted in website development | 2 Comments »
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Let’s run through the acronyms – SEO, SEM, PPC, SMO, getting confused yet?
Don’t be. They’re just shortcuts for search engine optimization, search engine marketing, pay per click, and social media optimization. Aren’t they all a part of the same family?
It depends. They certainly can all influence each other. And what I’d like to talk about today is how social media optimization (SMO) can be good search engine optimization (SEO).
The idea behind SMO is to connect with the wider world beyond your own website or blog. There’s certainly benefit in that of itself, but there is also benefit in SMO as SEO. It starts with a healthy idea of linking.
The Web is a social graph. Search engine robots find new sites to crawl through links. Visitors find new sites to explore through links. Links are the connectors of online relationships. When you link out to other sites of reputable authority then you are telling your website visitors that you recommend those sites you link to. It’s a vote of approval. Several things can happen as a result of that:
- Your visitors come back to see what else you’ll recommend
- The site owners of those sites you link to will visit your site
- Some of those site owners will reciprocate with a link back to you
- Your traffic will grow
- You’ll develop your own authority within your niche
- You’ll attract more inbound links due to your authority
The outcome, more inbound links, leads to higher search engine rankings – especially if those links are high value links from authority sites with the right anchor text.
So the question is, how does SMO lead to better SEO? The answer: When you build great content that is compelling and attracts readers, you’ll get more traffic and more site owners will link to you. To influence better SMO you should do what you can to encourage your visitors to share your content and link to it. Those two things, when they happen often, will do more to better your SMO and your SEO than anything else. And when you see it happen you’ll be total awe of the Net, I assure you.
Tags: links, SEO, SMO, social media optimization
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Do you know what the most important SEO factor is today? Even after ten years of search engine optimization best practices, there is still one SEO factor that outshines them all: Quality, Original Content.
That’s not to say that other factors aren’t important. Number of inbound links, link relevance, keyword density, keywords in URLs, keywords in title tags, meta tags, alt tags, authority of pages linking in, link age, and hundreds of other factors that influence SEO are still important. Some are more important than others. And most of these factors, when coupled with other factors, still are more powerful.
But overall, nothing compares to unique, original, quality content. All other factors being equal, quality original content still outshines all others as the most important SEO factor. Keep your content golden and your SEO will be golden.
Tags: content, keywords, links, SEO, SEO factors
Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Duplicate content has a bad rep online. I’m not sure how it started, but there’s a myth that is still perpetuated today about a duplicate content penalty. The myth stems from the fact that the search engines – primarily Google – limit a result of a search query to only so many pages with the same content. In other words, if 100 websites feature the exact same article and the that article is optimized for the key phrase “banana butter” then Google doesn’t want to show all 100 pages with that one article because it doesn’t really add value to the searcher who has to filter through all the articles to find original content. Therefore, Google omits some of those pages from the search result for the search query to prevent searcher frustration.
So how does Google decide which ones to omit? That’s a good question. I’m not sure I have all the answers, but one thing that is considered is originality. Google makes a very good attempt to include on the search results page at least the site that originally published that content. Whether Google succeeds at this perfectly is up for debate, but I believe they are making good efforts.
So what does this have to do with article marketing? Well, if you are submitting articles for mass distribution, it helps to be aware of how the search engines are receiving those articles. After an article has been published in so many directories and picked up by so many publishers, it really isn’t going to help you much in the search engines. You’ll still get the link credit every time someone uses the article, but don’t expect all of those thousands of articles to appear in the SERPs when someone searches for a key phrase that is important to them.
This isn’t to say you should ditch article marketing. Far from it. But I would add that another type of article marketing – one that doesn’t rely on mass distribution – can be useful in your efforts as well. If you’ll write an original article and submit it to one blog or website owner for review then you can build a reputation as someone who writes great articles and delivers quality while giving yourself quality back links and someone else quality, original content. No duplication.
As I said, I wouldn’t ditch mass distribution, but I would add the single distribution model of article marketing to your efforts. Just a suggestion.
Tags: article marketing, duplicate content, links, mass distribution
Posted in link building | 4 Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is a number 1 ranking for a long tail keyword based on nothing more than on-page content. If you keep it simple and build great content, it can happen. But how?
Here’s the key:
- Write content that people love to read. They’ll stay on the page longer and tell their friends. High traffic + low bounce rate = big SEO plus.
- Use your primary keyword liberally. Not in a spammy way. In a natural language way. But don’t be afraid to use your keyword.
- Put some external links on that page. Nothing is more beautiful than great site navigation with relevant links. Be sure those links have relevant anchor text.
That’s about it. It’s a very simple formula. Very basic. Beautiful. And brilliant.
Sometimes, the best SEO is just to do what’s natural.
Tags: keywords, links, relevance, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
Sitemaps have only been in common use for a couple of years now, but there is still confusion around some aspect of them. Your site is not guaranteed a listing in any search engine just because you have a sitemap. In fact, none of the search engines guarantee that your site will be crawled or indexed just because you have a sitemap. However, a sitemap will make your website more crawlable and easier to crawl.
Because the search engine spiderbots crawl the web through links, you want to make sure that each of the pages on your website has a crawlable inbound link to it so that it can be crawled, indexed, and ranked. That’s what a sitemap does for you.
You should have a sitemap if you have a new site and you don’t have that many links pointing to it yet. You should also have a sitemap if your site is older with a lot of pages archived that have no linking structure, or that have a bad linking structure. Other times you might include a sitemap on your website are:
- When you have dynamic content
- You use AJAX or Flash
- You have a lot of videos
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Your website isn’t getting indexed
In essence, if you want to ensure that your site is crawled an indexed then a sitemap will go a long way to help you. But having one doesn’t guarantee anything.
Tags: crawling, links, search engines, sitemaps
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 2 Comments »
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