Investigating Links Before Doing Business: Some Helpful Tips

Whether you fall on the more search-engine side of SEO or not, it’s helpful to know more about what you’re getting into, right?

We’ve seen it all before: a client’s website gets banned immediately after you greenlight them, and even though it wasn’t your fault, the timing is, let’s be honest, awful.

Normally, you try your best to improve aspects that are immediately within the client’s control. That’s just common sense of course. Most average to large websites have link equity they aren’t utilizing wisely, so naturally technical and structural stuff is normally investigated early on.

Let’s look at pre-sales due diligence. Our tactics for onsite investigation include:

1) Site querying to see how many indexed pages they have in relation to the actual size of the website;
2) Searching for our potential client’s keywords across the site;
3) On crucial pages, peeking at their source;
4) And of course, checking the site’s own linking structure.

For back links (off site), we do things like:

1) Optimizing anchor text on numerous occasions;
2) Sitewide links;
3) Shadow (hidden) links;
4) Sponsored links;
5) And last but certainly not least, links from low quality sites.

Using Games to Increase Your Link Building

One of the ways to increase your link building is through the use of games. These can be racing games, card games, or really any kind of game at all. Just keep it clean unless it fits with the subject of your site.

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5 Quick Ways to Generate Links

Need to generate links fast? Who doesn’t? Here are five quick ways to get those links going: Read the rest of this entry »

The Truth about Reciprocal Links

Let’s clear up some misconceptions about reciprocal linking.

1. Words like “diminished results” and “carry less weight” do NOT mean reciprocal links are worthless.
2. Reciprocal links WILL positively affect your rankings.
3. If you give a reciprocal link and the other web master removes the link – you haven’t damned your site to hell. It’s fine, doesn’t hurt a thing. You should remove the link, simply because your link partner has broken the trust – but you don’t have to watch your links daily or even monthly.
4. Reciprocal links (especially blog roll links) can generate traffic in their own right. Let’s not forget, bringing people to your site is the goal! If you have an opportunity to increase your traffic, exposure, or brand — take it! Never pass up an opportunity just because you think the search engines would disapprove.

Finally: Don’t be stingy. Give links generously. Credit your sources with a link. Provide valuable links for your visitors. This will help, not hurt your SEO efforts.

5 Easy Ways To Get On The Front Page Of Search Engines

Ever wonder how a website gets the top spot on Google?It’s all made possible by a technique known as search engine optimization. Learning SEO doesn’t take a college degree, but knowing where to begin can be difficult. To get you on the right track, we have provided five easy tips to set things in motion.

Keyword Research

To rank well in a search engine, you must not only know your niche, but your target audience as well. Think of words and phrases potential clients may enter when looking for your product or service. Several research tools are available for this cause such as Wordtracker and Google AdWords.

Page Titles

Implement keyword phrases into the titles tags of your pages as they are favorable with every search engine. Make sure the title reflects the content of your page and consist of keywords your niche audience may use.
Build For Spiders

Spiders are the robots that help your pages get indexed in a search engine. They go after text and cannot comprehend images and dynamic graphics. If your site must contain these features, make sure they’re linked to text-rich content.

Link Exchange

Getting involved in a link exchange program is never a bad idea. The more your pages are listed on the web, the better your site will rank.

Be Diverse

Keywords are important, but you should never fall in love with just one. Just because your site specializes in baseballs, that doesn’t mean it has to be the only keyword.