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Your Friend on the Web, Diana Ratliff

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Link Building

Cautions When Building Your Own Links

SEO is about backlinks to good contentAs you may know, a key factor in getting your site to rank well in the search engines is to have lots of links back (“backlinks”) to your site.

Which leads many people – including some clueless and/or unscrupulous “web designers” – to think that all they need is a TON of backlinks and they’ll beat their competitors to the #1 rank for their search terms.

It doesn’t work that way.

Talked to a prospect lately who’d been doing his own SEO and who’d achieved over 700 backlinks from 145 domains.  Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  He’d submitted his site to “like 1000” web directories, using his business name as the hyperlink text.

He’d invested quite a bit of time and effort and didn’t understand why his site didn’t rank higher.

IMPORTANT: To a large extent, being easy to find in Google IS a popularity contest, and good content is what makes you popular.  Being “popular” to the right people (sites) is critical.  The more competitive a search term is, the more important this becomes.  For example, ranking for “Columbia MO roof repair” is much easier than ranking for “weight loss” because fewer sites are competing for that term.

Here’s what was hurting him:

  • Those directory backlinks are considered low quality links – don’t do much for a site’s ranking at all.  They’re not coming from sites that are considered important by Google or the other search engines. Links from higher-ranking, more popular sites – especially those within his industry – would help enormously.
  • The anchor text was almost all the same.  Anchor text are the words that make up a hypertext link – they’re usually underlined or sometimes in another color.  (The words “Columbia MO roof repair” above are the anchor text in that link.) In the illustration to the right, all the words in blue are anchor text – when you click on them they lead to a different web page.  The search engines reward varied text; if you use your business name as anchor text everywhere online, you’re penalized with lower rankings.
  •  He wasn’t using social media at all – today, especially for national rankings or highly competitive terms, you need re-tweets, Facebook shares, et cetera.
  • Finally – he wasn’t adding new content to his site on a regular basis.  This is often done by using a blog or news section. Adding content gives the search engines a reason to come back to your site (to see what’s new) and it gives PEOPLE a reason to visit your site again – which is even more important!  Some of those people may link to your news or articles from their own sites.

What you need to remember from this is that it’s not just about the number of links.  It’s about their quality.  And the best way to get the attention of the search engines, and to attract backlinks, is to add quality content regularly.

A Link-Building Tactic That’s a Waste of Money

Recently I’ve had two different people approach me about building links to their websites to get them to rank higher in the search engines.  The first was a realtor who got this unsolicited email:

Subject: I looked at your website please read

I looked at your website and ran a scan to see how it ranks on major search engines. The website function with the Major search engines is way off. You really need a few simple changes to help your website.You have only a few inbound links when you should have thousands.

I create these.The top 20 search engines evaluate your sites performance based on how many you have.This determines your rankings.You have to submit your site to as many search engines as possible around the world and often.If not then the website will stay ranking far below the top 2 pages of major search engines.

I was in real estate for over 15 years and am a computer expert.  I can help your website. Your site also needs your meta tags changed. I do this for my clients for free. I provide free content and a good recipe database to draw clients.I am running A special right now. A one time fee. I understand that Realtors don’t print money at home so that’s why I am affordable.
This is the only way for your website to work properly.  No monthly costs, lets have a chat.

link building tactic that wastes moneySo what’s wrong?  How would taking this person up on their proposal hurt my realtor friend?

First – you don’t need to submit your site to the search engines at all.  Here’s where Google itself says that you don’t need to submit your site, and that most sites are not submitted.  Yes, you can help Google find your site faster, but odds are the major search engines will find you.  (The ones that don’t probably aren’t too important anyway.)

Second – and what this person didn’t tell my realtor friend (or simply didn’t notice) – the realtor doesn’t have their own website that is unique to the search engines.  They have a site that their real estate company provides, with a URL something like: http://www.bobsmith.real-estate-company.com.

The search engines don’t see that site as distinct because it ISN’T – it’s actually part of (a subdomain of) the real-estate-company.com site.  There are LOTS of realtors who have sites (subdomains) on real-estate-company.com (obviously, I’m not using the actual real estate company here in this example!)  No matter how many search engines you submit that site to, it will make little to no difference in the search engine rankings.

What the realtor really needs to do is build their own site, on their own domain, separate from the real estate company’s site, if they want to take advantage of leads from the search engines.  (And yes, I can build a very effective site for a realtor!)

SO… paying someone to submit your sites to the search engines is a waste of money, pure and simple.

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