SEO

Cautions When Building Your Own Links

SEO is about backlinks to good content As 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 money So 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.

Easy SEO Tip – Check Links to Competitors’ Sites

One of the biggest influencing factors in how high a site ranks in Google is the number and quality of other sites that link to them – what we call “backlinks”. (Because they’re links back to one particular site, from another site.)

If you want your site to rank higher than your competitor’s site, it’s very useful to see who links back to them. You may be able to get some of those sites to link back to your site as well. (You may get a backlink by leaving a comment on a post, by adding your site to their directory, by joining their association, by writing an article for that site, et cetera.)

To find a sampling of links to any site, you can perform a Google search using the link: operator. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list a selection of the web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page URL.

If you don’t get many results, perform the same search with and without the WWW in the domain name. (link:www.google.com and link:google.com)

Those Scary “Poor Google Rankings” Emails & Calls

Woman Scared Because Website Does Not Rank in Google If you’ve had a website for any length of time at all, you’ve probably gotten scary-sounding emails warning you that your site doesn’t rank in the search engines.

I got one just this morning:

We like your site, but we noticed that you are missing out on key web traffic due to where you show up on the search engines…

One of my clients got one yesterday that she forwarded to me:

Dear Business Owner: I searched for (search term) and (business name) was nowhere to be found… you’re buried in position number 11. That means potential clients aren’t finding you. Whether by luck or skill, 7 of your competitors are enjoying the benefits of being on page 1. Simply put, they are getting ALL your business.

An attorney friend told me that someone from a well-known industry-related web design/SEO firm kept calling him to tell him his site didn’t rank for X, Y and Z search terms.

If you get an email or phone call like this, should you be worried?

Guaranteed Page One Rankings In Google

[highlight color=”FFFF00″]90% of people never look past the first page of Google’s search engine results.[/highlight]

So it’s critically important that YOUR site show up on the first page (at least if you’re using your website as a prospecting or marketing tool.)

Quite a few SEO (search engine optimization) companies promise “guaranteed page 1 rankings”, which seems like a [phrase style=”53.png”] but be sure to ask LOTS of questions before working with such a company.

When someone says they’ll get you to the 1st page of Google, it may not be quite what YOU had in mind. They may simply use Pay-Per-Click marketing (Adwords) to buy ad space for you. They may get you ranked – but for really obscure, non-competitive, long keyword phrases that nobody searches for anyone. Or they may deliver page one rankings for your business name or local brand – something you ought to rank well for anyway.

And exactly what is their guarantee? If they don’t deliver the promised rankings, what happens? Do they refund your money, keep working at no cost until you do rank, or what?

A reputable SEO firm should have confidence in their abilities, yes, and have a track record of getting high rankings for their clients. I can give some pretty firm “probablies” once I’ve done a little research, and yes I have guaranteed results before – but it’s certainly not a blanket offer I make to everyone for every search term.

You should run from any search engine company who does.

SEO or SEM: Free or Pay-For Site Rankings

Making your site more visible in the search engines – getting it to rank high on the first page of the results for a given keyword (search term) – is a goal of most of the website owners I talk to. That’s because 90% of searchers never go past the 1st page of the search engine results.

A few fortunate website owners are savvy enough, and persistent enough, to get their site to rank without any help.

For the rest of us, hiring someone to help with SEO or SEM assumes greater importance. I’ll describe briefly, the pros/cons of each.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. “Optimizing” your site’s content and structure to make it more appealing (relevant) to Google and the other search engines is one way to get it to rank.

The other key to SEO is backlinks – getting other sites to link back to yours, so that the search engines see your site as a popular resource for those given terms. Sites that rank well this way show up in the natural or organic results – in the main body of the page. You do NOT pay Google or any other search engine for these rankings.

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. THESE are what you pay for – such as the Sponsored Ads on the top and right side of the search results pages. Through programs such as Google Adwords, you create small ads and pay every time someone clicks on the ad. (That’s why they’re called pay-per-click or PPC ads.) The more you pay, the higher on the page your ad shows, generally speaking. Some really popular, competitive keywords can cost more than $50 per click!

The advantage of SEO is that it’s cumulative, usually long-term – as you improve your site and get more and more backlinks, your site’s rank steadily improves. And once you get it to rank, it’s easier to get it to STAY there. Also, the vast majority of web surfers click on the natural/organic results – NOT the ads – because we don’t trust advertising. But it can take a while for SEO efforts to get results.

The advantage of PPC is that it is immediate – you can place an ad and have it show up the same day. It’s also a good way to test pages and offers – you can use an ad to direct traffic to something new and analyze how people respond. But when you stop paying – your site disappears. That’s the huge disadvantage – there is no cumulative benefit.

For most of my clients, I recommend PPC only until we get the rankings we want through SEO. After that, PPC is only for occasional testing, or perhaps when a new product is introduced.