Does SEO really work?

Absolutely, it is the only method that is going to get your website ranked high in the major search engines. When a visitor does a search on a major search engine, you need to make sure your website is one of the top on the list. Most people using the Internet will never go to the third or four pages of their searches.

I need to find the perfect SEO company

The great news is there are several SEO companies out there to choose from. A SEO company will get you the results you need, but first you need to make sure you find the perfect company for you and your needs.

It is always a good idea to ask any company you are interviewing prior to hiring them about their results. A good company will always have references that you can speak to on their behalf. This is a great way to make sure you are hiring the perfect company.

The matter of fact is that link building is one thing that has not dramatically changed. The more websites that you can get to link to you, the higher your website will rank in the search engines and the more visitors and customers your website will get. So how should we go about link building in 2010?

Well, my predictions are that this is the year that the Google toolbar pagerank will be dubbed worthless as it has been getting less and less effective and finding out which sites are of higher authority. Google is moving a lot more towards conversions and links that send traffic, however they are not ‘quite’ there yet, and until they are we can continue to build lots of little links quickly and reap the search engine benefits.

One link building method that will continue to be beneficial for many months and possibly years to come will be blog posts, because they accomplish so many things with one post. You reach a large bloggers audience and possibly his twitter/email syndication, you get a powerful backlink in the post, and you can get related links in your industry. The best part of this is guest posts are completely free and only require you to be up to date in your industry and you to be actually passionate about it. There are large blogs in nearly every niche in the world, so go start searching for flagship blogs that you can start writing for in your industry, and start leveraging off their success to build up your blog to their size, and then in good faith, offer your readers the ability to guest post off your success.

1. One Way Links

This became important after all the link exchange programs started sprouting up in hopes of manipulating search results. For a while it worked. Now, the best kind of link is not recipricol. One way links only please.

2. Backlinks To Linking Site

You will want to check the backlinks pointing into a site when considering it for a linking partner. No pagerank isnt everything, but it might be a good indication of the quality of links a site has pointing into it.

Remember, neighborhoods are important. So associate with quality sites. And don’t be afraid to link to quality when it makes sense for your reader.

3. Number of outbound Links On Linking Page

The more links pointing out, the less juice a link has. That’s the bottom line. It’s always best to have as few outbounds as possible on a page where you’re placing your link. However, it should be said that a link is a link, so don’t be too picky about outbounds, unless you’re paying for the placement.

PRO TIP:
The best links are the ones that occur naturally, because you have a good website with quality content.

Good luck and happy link building!

This is a guest post from our friends at Top Click Media.  Please visit their site for more search engine optimisation information.

Ultimately, the best kind of link you can get is one that is of decent pagerank but is extremely relevant to your niche. Google’s algorithm is moving more and more towards being relevancy based, because that is how they can filter out spammy websites easier than truthful ones. Imagine owning a website that talks about weight loss but the only backlinks the websites have are from porn or gambling websites. Google knows that these links are not all legitimate, and so since they are not relevant they are not as strong.

Now imagine a small niche weight loss site with dozens of PR1-4 links from highly relevant weight loss blogs. Google knows that the weight loss blogs have good authority and are making content-relevant posts talking about your weight loss site and so these links will be far more beneficial than a single PR6 link from a gambling site.

The diamond in the rough is being able to get the highly authoritative and high pagerank websites that are relevant to your niche, which are the best of both worlds.

Inbound links can help raise your chances of getting a better ranking in the search engines, but only if they have relevance to your site and if they come from sites that are also high-ranking. Both of these things are important, and which one is more important is arguable. In the past it was believed that the page ranks of inbound links were more important than anything, but many of the larger search engines have since changed their algorithms.

With that being the case, the relevance of the sites that are giving you inbound links and the keywords that they use are becoming more significant than the page rank of the sites that offer the links. One thing is clear, however: getting inbound links to your site from relevant sites is crucial if you want to succeed and see your page rank rise.

Popular ways of obtaining one way links to your website:

• Directory listings – some are free, some you must buy (usually permanent)
• Blog / Forum postings – social media/viral marketing

One way of acquiring backlinks to your site that is often overlooked and hardly ever talked about is from an eBay Store. eBay actually setup their store pages to be quite search engine friendly, which e business marketing specialists can use to their advantage. They let you specify the titles and keywords for all of your category pages. With a basic eBay Store subscription you are allowed to create 5 custom store pages. These pages are automatically built into the navigation of your store and quickly become indexed by the search engines. You can then deep link to pages within your website from the text on these custom pages in your ebay store.

SEO benefits of an eBay Store:

• Ability to specify titles and keywords for category pages
• Search engines love eBay listings
• Deep linking to pages within your website (one way links)
  
• Ability to control the anchor text of these backlinks
  

eBay has some strict policies regarding linking to external websites from listings or store pages. You must only link to outside pages that do not directly offer the same or similar items for sale (example: you can’t link to a product page on your website from your ebay store if the webpage shows a ‘buy now’ button or any prices)

It is wise to limit the outbound links on your ebay store pages to 3 or less per page. This would be about 15 total links from your ebay store to different pages on your website. A smart thing to do would be to link to the homepage on your website with about 5 of those links and with the remaining 10 link to different pages within your site (i.e. category pages or informational pages).

When you figure that a basic eBay Store will cost you $15.95 per month you can imagine what a great investment it is – not to mention you will probably sell your items as well. 15 one way inbound links for under twenty bucks? you can’t beat that.

The whole point of everything mentioned above is to improve search engine rankings and ultimately the online exposure of your business. The more keyword-rich backlinks you have pointing to your website the higher you will rank. Spend the extra time on your link building… it could be the single most important factor in search engine optimization.

If you look around the web for ways to build links, a lot of people tell you the obvious that you have already heard. Submit to directories, write articles, and exchange links, which has been repeated since 1999. So how can you build some strong links after you have already done the directories and simple stuff?

1.) Social Media
Social media sites are becoming insanely popular in the last two years, and many have some excellent pagerank on them. You can submit your websites to the most popular ones by visiting SocialMarker.com or by using Google to find your own social media websites to submit to.

2.) Pligg Sites
Pligg is an open source script that runs many of the social news websites. You can do a google search for “powered by pligg” and find over 1 MILLION places to add your link to, although it will take a bit of time.

3.) Buying links underground
A great way to build some links (if you are careful) is by joining webmaster forums like Digitalpoint.com and buying strong links directly from sellers, which reduces the risk that Google will find you. You should only do this if you know what you are doing though.

4.) Profile Links
Many websites that you can sign up for a free profile allow you to enter your homepage in your profile. The good thing about 90% of these websites is that they do not even know what link building is or how it will benefit them. You can use this to your advantage by joining hundreds of these websites and getting that good link from your profile, and then you can even promote your profiles with social media sites like I listed above.

These four areas you can spend countless hours building some excellent links if you have the time and effort to do so. So get on out there and start building some links to improve your search engine rankings.

How many links you need for a good ranking, depends on how many your competitors have. If they only have a few, you only need a few. If they have hundreds…well, you’re going to need to do some serious link building. It’s also not just the number of links that you have. They need to go to sites that are popular and that are of good quality. Otherwise they are mostly pointless.

Directory listings are a great way to get links, so that should be your first stop. Next, work on getting reciprocal links from complementary sites that aren’t competitors. You should also create a testimonials page where you recommend products and services and you may get links to the sites that you like. You can also publish articles and make sure that they have your bio and link information so that people can find you. Discussion forums, affiliate programs, and contests are also all great ways to get more links.

Basically, you put a link to their site on your Webpage and they put a link to your Website on their page. It takes a little bit of time to do that, but it’s really not difficult. Some people wonder what the point is, but you get free advertising by trading links, and that can be a great thing, provided the site that wants to trade with you is a good one. You can also put a lot more links on your site that way, and search engines like links, as long as they are legitimate. With that being the case, the more the merrier.

Just make sure you pay attention to the sites that you’re linking to. If they don’t represent the kinds of values that you have or they would be detrimental to your site or your customer base, you don’t have to trade links

They mostly work like this: for every piece of information that you provide (article, etc.), you get a link back to your site. It has to be something that you wrote or that you have permission to use. You can’t just steal something from someone else’s site, lay claim to it, and try to get links that way.

By doing it the legitimate way it brings traffic in, it’s not spammy, and it doesn’t require you to buy links from sites that might be less than reputable. Most of these sites make their money from advertising, so they don’t have to worry about charging you money.

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.

Several webmasters are concerned about achieving higher search engine rankings.SEO can be a challenge, but there are a few secrets known in industries around the world that will not only improve your web presence, put your placement in the rankings as well.

Relevant Keywords

Keywords are perhaps the most essential element of SEO. These words and phrases should be sprinkled into your web pages and at the same time, pique the interests of your visitors. All of your pages should be configured in this manner with keywords fused into descriptions, title tags and metadata. This will attract the search engine spiders and enable your pages to be indexed.

Consistently Update Your Pages

Frequently refreshing your pages is a great way to improve search engine rankings. Google is one search engine that indexes every revision made to your site. The more strategic updates you make, the more your pages will be indexed, giving you the ability to amass more keywords for your site.

Link Popularity

Similar to keywords, the more relevant the link, the better. The key to linking is having your URL listed on relevant sites opposed to simply loading your web pages with links from other sites.

When blogging first caught on, a person could just blog about a topic that others were interested in and have a huge readership. Put a few links and ads on there, and you had yourself a great moneymaker for only a few minutes worth of work each day.

Now those days are over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be successful as a blogger, you just have to work at it a bit more.

Finding a good niche that people are interested in is the key, but there are so many blogs today that yours has to stand out. You need a plan for your blog, instead of just throwing it out there randomly.

Know what you’re going to talk about, have knowledge of your topic, and find out about your audience before you start posting and getting frustrated because no one is reading what you’ve got to say. It’s much more important for you, if you want to make money, to talk about something that you enjoy and that other readers can relate to.

If you don’t care about your topic and are only writing to make money, your readers will see that and go elsewhere to get their information.

Another advantage to having a blog, regardless of your industry, is a blogs ability to add weight to your organic position by utilizing long tail keywords. Ask us how having a blog can help you attract more business.

The following is a day-by-day example of the promotion in action. I’ve skipped the ‘creation of content’ step and moved directly to publishing and promoting.

	Day 1 Content published by 6 pm. Promotion through contacts begins. Pushing the content requires constant attention. It’s impossible to guarantee success but hard work and valuable contacts always help. It’s a long sleepless night with lots of caffeine.

	Day 2 Promotion of content through network continues until the early afternoon. By 3 pm all resources have been exhausted and the buzz / link baiting nature of the content is left to stand on it’s own. Visitors are compounding hourly. Finally time to take a break!

	Day 3 The content has been republished on social networks by complete strangers. Visitors per hour peaks around 5 pm. The campaign is a huge success. It’s not possible to predict how much traffic a campaign like this will generate, but we are always happy with anything over 5000 visitors. This campaign has already resulted in 30,000 visitors.

	Day 4 Direct visitors and search engine traffic now account for a large portion of the traffic. The site is ranking page 1 for all searches associated with the content.

	Day 5 Traffic is trending slightly up again. Mostly due to direct visitors. Likely cause: email to friends. Usually traffic tapers off by Day 5.

The traffic and links generated rarely have instant sales potential. For a concept to “go viral” it must appeal to a large audience and particularly to opinion makers and trendsetters. Trendsetters do not usually “buzz” about commercial products. The concept here is to give something away, and gain an audience.

The true value comes from attracting people and links to your site. Success results in a lasting flow of traffic and recognition from the search engines. It’s also been our experience that the search engines like to ‘follow a leader’ – once you’ve had a successful viral-buzz-baiting event, your content from that point forward gets unique attention.

What does it cost? From start to finish this internet marketing technique often requires close to 80 hours of work. In addition it is necessary to enlist the help of other internet marketers that will call in the favors in the future. Pricing will vary depending on the nature of the site being promoted and the ideal content for that site. At a minimum you’ll need a marketing budget of a few thousand dollars to implement this strategy.

The long term lasting effects of a successful viral-buzz-baiting campaign are a competitive advantage to your business. Once you have the ability to command an audience to your site, the web becomes a much friendlier place.

This technique is one of the many powerful SEO strategies the Bloom SEO Company can use to benefit your online marketing campaign.

Believing this would effect the ranking, he contacted the website administrator for an explanation. He was told that a blog is ranked as a whole and individual post pages do not rank in Google. While this explanation was given to persuade the business owner that the ranking wouldn’t be negatively impacted, we’ve discovered something that may lead you to believe otherwise.

Blogs are listed on what would be the homepage of a typical website. All the other pages act as separate entities and indexed as so by search engines. What this means is that web pages do not receive ranking to a search engine just because they are linked to a search engine optimized homepage.

However, Google is cracking down on those purchasing paid review links for ranking purposes. For this reason, you may want to practice a few genuine SEO techniques to prevent from being excluded.

Soon you’ll have 20 domains you control that are all within the niche your primary site is in. Now write a nice post on the front page of all of them. You just landed 20 of the highest quality links possible. A glowing review, a great link with the keywords you want.

SEO professionals have been using this technique for years. If you would prefer to have your SEO campaign professionally managed, start by getting your FREE SEO Report.