Hi and welcome to my 1st Blog on SEO Positives new website!
Each week I will be providing you with my digital marketing Top Tips on how your online business can stay ahead of your competitors! We look after some of the biggest clients on the internet, here are a few of them: promocodes.co.uk, luggagesuperstore.co.uk, voijeans.co.uk, partybritain.co.uk and spabreak.co.uk for more examples please see our case studies.
1. Blogging
Creating a Blog on your website is an essential part of your online marketing strategy and vital to keep your visitors engaged with news about your business. Your blog is like a newsfeed, so it’s essential to create unique interesting articles which contain links to relevant pages back within your website. If you copy and paste another article and re blog it, remember Google could penalise your site for copied text. As a general rule of thumb only use 1 link per 100 words, this will help Google crawl for keywords associated about your business. A perfect example to see how it’s done is by clicking on the words that are underlined within this article. Remember to update this as much as possible and I would suggest you spend 30 minutes daily doing this task which will benefit your websites online presence massively.
2. XML Sitemap
Your website is like a book, your menu bar is like a contents page so this needs to be clear and simple so that your visitors can navigate around your site and look at pages. You may already have a site map on your website which is like an index page in a book. By creating an XML sitemap which is tailor made especially for Google, allowing it to crawl/read your keywords on all your pages. Please see our website for an excellent example of an XML Sitemap.
3. Google Analytics
Any one that has an online presence for a personal website, small or giant online business should have Google analytics. It’s a vital part of your marketing strategy and its one of the most powerful web analytics tracking solutions that will help you understand customer trends visiting your site. This will help you improve and implement new strategies for customers to purchase or contact you resulting in a conversion. In addition Google Adwords (PPC) customers can even see their Analytics data from inside their Adwords account, plus Google Analytics is free for anyone to use.
Recently, many SEO ’s and tech heads noticed that Google’s campaign for Chrome, which was how the browser could help your business. Was somewhat spammy and didn’t mention how it could help businesses. Every article had the Chrome video at the bottom and this was seen by the viewers as a paid link attempt.
Google finally penalised the Chrome page, if you search the word browser, Chrome no longer appears on page 1 and is now position 61. Google has said that they will penalise this page by reducing its PageRank which will reduce its ability to rank for terms such as browser. G also added that this punishment will last for at least 60 days.
Comparing The Damage
If a webmaster was to do something like this on their own site. There is no doubt that the website would be taken off of Google’s listings. Whereas the chrome page is still in the listings, well the sub-listings for the Chrome support page when the term “Chrome” or “Google Chrome” is searched for.
Looking At Both Sides
Many webmasters would not hesitate to complain about the “unfairness” of this occurrence. Google basically paid for links and slightly lowered their PR, like I said before, if anyone but Google were to do that, then their site would be removed. It can be argued that if Google is really aiming for fairness with their search engine, then they would have been treated like everyone else.
Looking at it from Google’s point of view and also the users of Google (who are the most important), if Google did completely remove the Google Chrome page, then this would have a negative search experience for the user. Which could end up diminishing the amount of searches Google receives and for us SEO’s that is bad news.
I’d also like to mention that it is Google’s search engine. This is an obvious statement, yes, but all complaints are based on how unfair the situation has been treated. Google could have simply shrugged off any complaints and done nothing to “resolve” the matter. At least some action has been taken.
Conclusion
Of course Google are going to drop the charges as soon as the 60th day comes along, but why wouldn’t they? Many people in their position would completely ignore the complaints made and carry on as normal. If anything it is surprising that Google has taken this action because that now leaves Mozilla Firefox in the top spot for the term browser, so we could potentially see a rise in users for Firefox and possibly a decrease for Chrome. We will have to wait and see what is to come in the 60 days to come.
Do not exist; Twitter marks all of their links that are outbound as no follow. Even the links in Twitter user’s bio, but that does not mean Twitter cannot be used to bring in links.
The Twitter feed known as Twylah, pulls all tweets from your Twitter stream and post them on your profile page. The only problem with this is that Twitter users will most likely be using URL shorteners which such as bit.ly, this means that the URL will not have an anchor text, which would be very helpful, however having that link which points to your site is better than nothing.
If your Twitter profile is on topic the majority of the time, then the links that are sent out will be seen as more important. Not only that, but if you do some link building to your Twylah page to increase its’ PR and SEO value, then the links that Twylah send out will become even more important!
If you want to make the most out of Twylahs links, stop using URL shorteners as this will help with branding. However if your posts are too long, then you will either have to live with bit.ly’s or shorten the rest of your content.
You must not get too carried away with this using Twitter as a link building service, if you would like to do this then I would suggest creating a dummy profile just for SEO links. Because if your following on Twitter joined before you started using Twitter as a link builder, you will no doubt lose your following.
Conclusion
Twylah is a great way to pull in free links, but it is essential to not get carried away with it, make sure your original use for Twitter is still there, otherwise you will find your profile is losing follows gradually until you have none left.
Everyone loves a free link, and if it doesn’t take a lot of effort to do, you’re mad for not doing it. Google Plus has released business pages so you can now create a profile for your business, but not only that, you can use this profile to help improve your SEO efforts.
There are 3 areas on each Google Plus page or profile that you can use to send links your way: introduction, website and recommended links. The last two are fairly obvious to send links your way but you need to make sure you are using them properly. The first is introduction; this is the designated area to describe yourself or your business. Make sure your keywords are in this section as it will not only help you rank on Google + but you can use this to help your site rank. Simply highlight a keyword or phrase, select link and add in your website.
The website area is self-explanatory but there is no opportunity for an anchor link like the introduction area. The recommended links section allows you to show your friends your favourite pages. The title of the page is basically the anchor text, so in this case, you can take the usability route or the SEO route. The usability method would be to name the page, for example SEO Positive sends you to our home page. However this opportunity could be used for SEO purposes and you could enter one of your keywords. This choice will vary depending on how you want to use your Google Profile, if you are using it simply for the SEO factor then no doubt you will be making the most of the anchor text, but you could also use this for reputation management. However this is another story.
Social Networks like Google Plus offer you the links for free, which will help your SEO efforts and help you rise through Google’s SERP’s. Opportunities like this need to be made the most of because they could make all of the difference in the rankings, and from a high ranking site like Google, it is an essential link grab that if anything is encouraged.
Everyone wants as many links as possible pointing to their site, for obvious reasons this is going to have a positive effect on SEO. However if your site has a tonne of outbound links, Google is likely to see your site as low quality and just another site that sells links to others.
Maybe you are not selling links, but on the other hand you may have far too many outbound links which will have a negative effect. So what is the best practice in this case? Well as we all know, SEO has no set guidelines. Any information found is basically advice which is based around research from well performing sites or case studies from experiments with different factors such as exact domains and so on.
Three huge keywords are: Insurance, Loans and Mortgage. There are obviously way more competitive terms which are a little more adult, but let’s keep the research tidy in this instance.
Confused ranks number one for the term insurance (congratulations), upon looking at their links, I found that they have 91 do-follow internal links and only 2 do-follow external links. The external links are to their social media profiles, Twitter and Facebook.
Money Supermarket’s loans page ranks number one for the keyword loans. On the loans page, they have 150 internal do-follow links and 12 external do-follow links. The links appear to be to sites and companies that they compare prices and quotes from.
Money Supermarket also rank number one for mortgage with their mortgage page. On this page, there are 161 internal do-follow links and 25 external do-follow links, similarly to their loans page, their external links are to companies in which they compare prices.
Confused.com has a ratio of 45.5 internal links to 1 external link. Money Supermarket and their loans page has a ratio of 12.5 internal do-follow links to 1 external do-follow links and finally Money Supermarket’s mortgage page has 6.44 external do-follow links to 1 internal do-follow link.
Conclusion
It is safe to say that the ratios do fluctuate quite a bit, however everyone has a different approach to SEO but what I can say is that there should always be more internal links than external, and the amount of links you should be aiming for is 100-150 ideally. Remember that these are only guidelines and that in each situation the approach will be different, but it is well worth researching your competitors to compare their campaign to yours.
Optimising your social media profile is very similar to a website. There are fields like bio and name which are like the page title and description, but the main advantage is that if you are regularly using these profiles, then your page will have fresh and regular content, which Google loves. So how do you make the most of this opportunity?
Firstly, these profiles will naturally rank quite high when searching the name of the profile in Google. If there is a consistency in the profile names, for example all of our profiles are named either SEO Positive or SEO Positive LTD, these naturally rank. However, if we want our Twitter, Facebook and Google plus profiles to pop up when someone searches the name SEO Positive, how do we do that?
Link building, it is a very simple technique that works with websites and also social media profiles. If you or your company has a blog, throw a link in to your profile, for example you can mention the word Twitter, and link your Twitter profile to that. If you want to take the more extreme route, you can use an anchor text link with your business name. This is the best thing you can do to optimise your profiles. By making an effort of linking to your profiles in each of your blogs, even if they are guest posts, then your profiles will rank higher because of this.
Having your social media profiles rank higher is great for things like reputation management, because it makes your profiles more visible to potential customers which will not only help increase your following, but also help your customers get to know you and your company a little better.
Conclusion
Because your own company name is not a very competitive key term, so you should see results quite soon, and if you make a conscious effort to send links in the direction of your social media profiles, then your profiles will stay up there and not only help build your fan base or following, but help build and maintain your current reputation.
If you were to try and use Twitter to help link build for your site, you would be called insane because Twitter make all of their links no follow. What if there was a way that you could use you Twitters’ content, to create a website and link out from that website to your own site which is in need of inbound links.
Twylah is an ingenious idea that has been long awaited. The site pulls all of your content from Twitter and organises it into topics which is based on keywords in the mini blogs. Twylah also shows what topics are trending with each user. According to Twylah, my trending topics are: SEO, Google, Facebook, Brand, Social Media and Google +. That sounds fairly accurate to me.
Besides Twylahs’ clever trending feature, it has much higher potential. I myself guest blog quite frequently, and have made a constant effort to link build to my Twylah page to help increase the worth of that site in Googles’ eyes. My Twylah page has a PR of 1, however I have also been link building to SEO Positive’s Twylah page and they have a PR of 3! This must be due to where the links are coming from because the SEO Positive page has a few links going to the page where as my laustinseo Twylah page currently has none. This must be due to SEO Positives PR of 5.
So if your Twylah page does have a relatively high PR, then you can begin to use it. The first and most obvious would be to link to pages that need more attention in terms of search engine optimisation, this is what would naturally happen, but also you could begin to sell a link going from your Twylah page, to someone elses and it can become an outgoing link service, all from your Twitter feed. There are a lot of possibilities with Twylah, and as your page progresses, its’ worth will increase.
One of the best and most popular ways of marketing your website or online business over the Internet is using SEO. However, since search engine optimization (SEO) is such a common tool today, you need to incorporate something special in order to make SEO work for you. An essential part of SEO is link building and it is widely used. This process involves generation of links through blogs, forum posting and directory submission but not limited to this. If you establish several inbound links leading to your main website then your page will be ranked higher in search engines depending on the keywords that you are optimizing for. The links that are one way are much more helpful in boosting the rank of your page as compared to reciprocal or multi-way links.
The targeted traffic of a website is a main consideration before the starting of link building activities. This determines where you would want to place the links that are leading to your website so that you can ensure that the users who are directed to your profile are interested in your products and services. The chance of your profits rising increases with the amount of relevant traffic that you drive in. the most effective method to build links is by establishing one way links that directs to your website according to SEO experts. This would be an inbound link that would point to only one direction. This kind of a link is given the highest recognition by search engine bots while defining the relevancy of your pages. You can build one-way links by sending articles to article directories and content sites that are related to your website. Usually such sites have a resource box where you can type the link that points to the resource website.
A second method of link building is multi-way link building. This involves the creation of several non-reciprocal links among websites that have at least three partners. These links go only one way. You can also use other ways of link building such as posting videos, images, RSS feeds on the websites of your partners. You can start a link campaign with the help of professional SEO services. Such services will offer to do your link building campaign in exchange of specific rates. The professional link-building services manage to increase the relevancy of your page by planting permanent and inbound links that point to your website.
You should be aware of not doing overlinking. This means you should not have too many hyperlinks. The search engine bots that are for the main search engines like Google and Yahoo have the capacity of recognizing whether certain links are relevant or not. Excessive links on a page makes these bots disregard them in determining the rank of your page.
We’ve all noted in recent years how SEO has become increasingly important, and nothing seems to be changing on that front. Businesses online, individual sites, blogs and a host of other media strive to get their sites on a good Search Engine Results Page (SERP), but how do they do this? Well, they tackle SEO.
We all know that nowadays one of the most effective ways to get PageRank and those page good rankings is to delve into link building. Black hat, white hat and all those in between have been tried and tested and, of that, link bait has emerged as a powerful tool – and many have now started thinking up and creating link baiting strategies to get those valuable links. However, what we must remember is that there are those link building strategies that have changed the world; but how did they do it you might wonder.
If you look at the examples below they are forms of “natural link bait”, if you will What they did was create something so valuable that what they got in return was far greater than they could have hoped for. What this has done now is opened the door for others, you and me included, to create something that will have a major impact on the success of any online media campaign.
To access these tools that have been created, we will be using Opensiteexplorer, which is a form of link bait and a tool that many online marketers use with more than 60 000 inbound links. This is very advantageous, as they are seen as a huge authority figure in the online marketing world.
Adobe reader
Firstly let’s look at Adobe reader. They have created a reader for us to read PDF’s on your PC, and you can get it for FREE. Of course, they have other programs that you pay for, but at the start of it all Adobe set out to create something free for the people, and look what they got.
A PageRank of Ten (recognized as equally powerful to Facebook and Google) and almost six and half million inbound links, now, that is just amazing. If you suddenly say yes but it is Adobe they are a large corporation, well my answer is that they never started there. They created something for free that everyone decided to use and if you have the means you can do it too.
VideoLan organization (VLC)
If you are a movie, series or video nut like me, you would have heard of VLC. On their website it states, “A project and a non-profit organization, composed of volunteers developing and promoting free, open-source multimedia solutions.”
This again is showing that these guys set out to create an open sourced tool that everyone can use for free, turns out it is the most popular tool in its field (they make some money through donations to keep the dream alive).
Again, we can see the authority of the site and with over 200 000 inbound links, they have become one of the most respected video cross-platform multimedia player authorities. Yet another example of how creating something like this and offering it for free can create an almost viral link bait.
PR Checker
Finally, looking at a site such as PR Checker (a site that offers a free tool to check the PageRank of a site) all you have to do is insert your sites URL and it will pull the information.
Something that, out of the three examples, is the most unknown and probably the easiest to make has inbound links amounting to 3.7 million. This would be almost unbelievable if the stats were not in front of you. This also means that it gives them the authority now that, if they take on other projects, they will already have the trust and perceived expertise that can give them a head start.
Thus, one can see all the benefits that ‘natural link bait’ can bring. Simply by these sites creating a tool that was intended as a ‘stick it to the man’ kind of gesture, in creating something everyone could access free, pioneers like these have created link building that changed the online world. Anyone, if they have the drive to do it, then, who knows? Your site could offer the next free tool that is on everyone’s sites and minds.
Cale Pissarra is an experienced SEO that has been helping companies rank organically for many years now. He has been working for a SEO company with some of the best SEO consultants in the business.
Speaking to others within the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, it’s surprising how often the subject of ethics arises. It’s a subject that’s discussed on an incredibly frequent basis.
The reason for this is the way in which the search engines look upon the subject of SEO. If you listen to employees from Google and the other leading search engines, then you’ll hear them talking about how it’s wrong to manipulate the search engine rankings. The problem is that SEO companies are paid to do exactly this.
Clients aren’t paying monthly fees because they like to be kind. They want to see results and that means improvements in positioning.
Black hat versus white hat
Naturally, this almost always leads to a discussion about the merits of black hat SEO. There’s general agreement within the community that black hat techniques are those that are seriously frowned upon by the search engines. But this doesn’t mean that these techniques are necessarily avoided as a result.
Indeed, it’s fair to say that some competitive industries see widespread use of black hat techniques, including cloaking and the use of paid links.
But there’s also a clear argument that says that such an approach is simply not sustainable. It’s only a matter of time, so the argument goes, until the search engines take a closer look at your approach and start to apply penalties. As a result, it’s generally agreed that white hat techniques should be used by companies wishing to gain positioning and then maintain that positioning for the long-term.
Accepted techniques
So what techniques can be used in order to build links in an ethical manner? How can you produce a sustainable way of doing small business SEO? One approach that can certainly work is building content that others will want to link to. This is, of course, easier said than done!
You might look to create a resource that’s simply too good to miss. Short guides are often attractive as pages too. But there’s nothing quite like building a reputation as an expert within your field. People love to hear what experts have to say. They love to reference their work too.
As a result, building your profile so that you are seen as one of the experts within your chosen area is a great way of gaining plenty of good quality inbound links.
Spreading the word
How can you go about building this profile of expertise? You’ll need to think carefully about your strategy.
Guest blogging is one tactic that can work particularly well. In effect, you are offering content in exchange for a link back to your website. For starters, this allows you to gain valuable inbound links to your site. But it has far more value than this.
The process of guest blogging gives you a platform. How you use that stage is up to you, although it seems clear that you’ll derive the greatest benefit if you provide highly informative, interesting pieces.
Doing so will probably encourage website owners to approach you to provide more content in the future. Creating a positive picture of your work and knowledge will also mean that you’ll be building your online profile and presence. In short, this method will help to establish you as a recognised expert.
Final thoughts
There isn’t one, single successful way of carrying out SEO. There are numerous approaches that can work. As suggested above, it is possible to carry out link building in an ethical, sustainable manner. It just needs a little more work!
Keith Barrett provides search engine optimisation services to companies of all sizes in the UK. He has been working in this industry for more than a decade.
