Link Building Archives - Page 2 of 2 - The Content Marketing Blog

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the website visibility in the search results of search engines. This process involves various SEO techniques to improve ranking.

The need for SEO arises because research shows that most people don’t look beyond the first page of search results, so if you want to create awareness about your brand, then you need to appear at the top of search results.

Effective SEO can help you:

Broaden awareness in new geographical areas
Build reputation among customers, employees
Improve customer service by delivering strong online support
Increase awareness of product benefits among public
You can improve the products, by conversing online with the customers via blogs, forums and feedback forms.

How does SEO work?

Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing index pages on the web with the help of spiders or crawlers. These spiders or crawlers use web pages links and travel from one site to another after the links. When search engines find any new page, then it will crawl its code and transfer it back to its data center. To keep their index fresh, spiders may visit indexed websites daily. Search engines use a formula commonly known as Algorithm to “rate” relevancy of the websites for each search query. The most relevant websites for a particular search query appears at the top of search results.

Some of the major factors contributing in Google algorithms for better ranking in search results are:

Keyword rich on-page content in the form of paragraphs
Keywords in description tag
Number of links on a page
Keywords in title tag
The number and quality of the web pages available on the internet that are linking to your site
Keyword density

Visibility of the website can affected by two basic factors:

On-page SEO factors
Off-page SEO factors

On-page SEO factors: On-page factors are those factors which affect visibility of the website on search engines, but it can only found on your website. These factors include:

Content, title of URL, title and Meta descriptions and keyword density. Different search engines place different values on various elements. For instance, what Google carries value for particular element may not equally important for Yahoo?

Off-page SEO factors: off-page factors are those factors which affect t visibility of the website but cannot be found on your website. To find relevancy of your website on the basis of off-page factors, search engine will assess that, what other websites think about your websites. It will depend on the measure and quality of the links which you will receive from other websites.

Search Engine Optimization is extremely a wide topic. Besides this there are no set of particular rules for optimizing the websites for search engines. Due to this online marketers work hard to search or find the loopholes within the search engine algorithms and once they find, they end up with providing UN suitable or irrelevant content to users. To sort out this, search engines update their algorithm constantly, so that they cover up these loopholes and give relevant content to the users.

Kristine Lise an author who is interested in written on SEO/ Internet marketing related topics. She is currently working with SEO Rank Smart, who offers best SEO Packages to its clients you can see her work on her company site.

Links aren’t so bad after all

For quite some time now there has been a rather intense debate within the SEO community regarding links. Exactly what is their value? What does Google think about link building?
The list of questions goes on, and there are always multiple views on every issue.
Perhaps in an effort to set the record straight (as much as Google can or will) or for some reason unknown to us, Mr. Cutts has shed a little more light on the subject of links and their relativity to web rankings.
According to Mr. Cutts, links are still a viable ranking factor. He did not comment on exactly how much links influenced rankings, but getting this level of information from anyone of his influence in the search field is definitely a big deal.

Link building is okay!

As if this wasn’t exciting enough, Matt Cutts goes on to talk about Google’s stance on link building. As it turns out, link building itself is not the problem, but rather the way many people approach the concept is flawed. The idea is not to focus on getting people to link to you or building links simply for the sake of doing so. Instead, the focus should be on creating the kind of content that people want to link to all on their own. Sure you can include social sharing buttons and other elements to make sharing easier, but the content should be able to stand alone and be awesome with or without incentives or opportunities for easy sharing.
He also spoke about a few content marketing / link building practices that could use a different approach as well:

Press releases – Press releases shouldn’t be thought of as link building vehicles first, and information sources last. Instead the focus should be on attracting the attention of media outlets and journalists who might be interested in promoting your story. Though press releases often allow for a link to be included, make sure that any links you make a part of the release are relevant to the information in the release and on the page of your website you’re linking to. Make your press release more about information than purely about SEO.

Guest posting – Because it has been identified as a way to build links, guest posting has gotten off track and has promoted the creation of blogs and websites that aren’t all that dissimilar to the bloated low-quality article directories that were hit hard by the Panda algorithm update. Essentially a trend of submitting less than amazing content to blogs of less than stellar reputation just for the sake of gaining a link or two has become common practice, and that isn’t the way things should be. Instead guest posting should be about generating more awareness and exposure for your brand, and reaching out to new audiences while networking with other bloggers and businesses in your industry. There needs to be more focus on quality content and building relationships, leaving link building as a pleasant side benefit, not the main event.

Guest Blogger – Kris Dietz

I love creating something amazing then spreading the word about it! My mission is to develop and mold SEO into an amazing outlet of sharing valuable resources. I enjoy networking and meeting like minded individuals.