Link Building Efforts Should be Real, not Fabricated

When it comes to a small business website, a significant SEO strategy is your best bet towards driving up visits from online search results. A major component of your SEO strategy should be link building, which means getting links TO your website from other online sources. Unfortunately some companies fall into the misnomer that buying links can easily increase the inbound link numbers, and positively effect search results.

Google has caught on to bought links

Google has gotten so wise to the purchased link market that they will hold it against you. Websites who have a lot of purchased, or spam, links, will be kicked out of Google all together. Google is so serious about this that many blogs have no-follow on their ad links in order to let Google know “this is a bought link, so please don’t count it.” It’s a way to still buy advertising, but not have it held against you in Google.

Fabricated links are obvious to Google

Many companies purchase the services of an SEO company, not realizing that these so-called experts are engaging in “black-hat” or “fake” SEO that could actually hurt their search engine rankings. Some examples of fabricated SEO efforts:

• Putting random comments on blogs to try and gain a back link. We receive dozens of these daily, often the same poster putting the exact same comment on different blog posts. We use Askimet, which is a plugin that weeds out fake comments, so these comments never go live on our blog.
• Buying advertising on parked domains. These pages are often structured around a particular topic so it looks like you’ve gained a pertinent link, but Google is wise to these spam pages and will count these bought links against you.
• Adding your company to link farms. These are sites that are created to appear as if they are a business directory, when in fact they are simply a huge directory of outbound links.
• Duplicating content across the net. This would mean taking the same article and publishing it over and over into many article directories so you can get the in-bound links within the articles. Google is wise to over duplication of content.
• Keyword stuffing pages. Putting to many of the same keyword on a page on your site in an effort to increase the relevance. A keyword density of more than 7% is considered keyword stuffing.

Link building strategies should be authentic

When you set out to gain links into your site, you must find authentic ways to do so. The following provides examples of authentic ways to build your inbound links:

• List your company in online business directories that are pertinent to your industry.
• Comment on blogs that you have honest, valuable comments to contribute to the subject being discussed.
• Create a Squidoo or Hubpages page about a topic pertinent to your business and of interest to others.
• Comment on message boards pertinent to your business arena.
• Write interesting articles and publish them in online article directories.

Rule of thumb

When engaging in a link building strategy, just ask yourself, “Is this content adding value?” This should be your rule of thumb when deciding on how to gain links into your website. If you are putting the link merely to get a link back, this may be risky. If you are putting the link to generate useful content, then continue on!

Free SEO Copywriting Report from ScribeSEO

SEO is all about the words. How you write your words, put them together and publish them determines your fate in the search engine rankings. Weaving in your keywords is the crux of getting the highest rankings. But how can you be sure you have done it appropriately?

You might ask yourself:

• Have I chosen the right keywords?
• Have I used keywords too many times (which will hurt you if you have)?
• Do the keywords show up in key areas of my page?
• Should I write for my users or the search engines?

Scribe has created a plugin that will answer all these questions for you. This simple plugin works in WordPress and Joomla, and it can analyze your page and let you know your SEO score. It gives you an actual percentage out of a 100 to let you know how well you’ve done. But Scribe goes one beyond that, it gives you suggestions on how to fix your content in order to get a higher score. With one click you can find out how well you’re doing and if the search engines are going to like what they see.

Scribe has gone one step further in offering a FREE PDF download on how to write content for the web. This report will help you learn the ins and outs of writing for the Web. Written by Copyblogger founder Brian Clark, this definitive guide is a must-have for anybody who writes a blog or manages a website. The best part is, this download is totally free. You don’t have to sign up for an email list, create a login account, or anything. Simply go to the Scribe download page and click download.

SEO: Figuring Out Where Your Visitors Come From

In the first article on understanding and implementing a plan for SEO, we discussed the terminology of Measuring Website Effectiveness. Let’s discover what these terms mean in relation to your website and how visitors use it.

The answers to the questions below help you make changes to your website so the content and structure is more effective for the user.   They may also suggest that you should evaluate your marketing strategy and message especially if your sales and other marketing results are not strong.

When people find your website, it is important to know:

• How many people visit your website and Is there a trend up or down?
• How did they find your site?
• What information do they look at?
• Did the visitor’s usage pattern indicate that the website helped you achieve some business goal?
• What actions do they take after they visit my website?

The statistics that help you understand the first two questions are discussed below.  The other questions will be addressed in the next blog.

How many people visit your site?

• Visitor count: A higher visitor count indicates more people are finding your website.  If you started an SEO campaign, this is one measure to indicate if your efforts are helping.  If you have a new promotional offer online or a new service listed and your visitor count is higher, check the landing pages to see which page viewers visit first.  If they visit a page with promotional content, this indicates if your promotion is generating traffic.
• Unique visitors: If your website does not have features that draw people back to it, you would expect that the unique visitors would be relatively high as a percentage of total visitors.  This may indicate that your site does not offer enough value to draw people back again.  Some features that draw people back again include a subscription service for premium content, regularly updating content, special offers or coupons online, and rss feeds (automatic content updates from other related websites).  Other effective means of developing repeat visitors for some business include message boards and polls.

However a high unique visitor count as a percentage of the total visitor count may also indicate a new website or really effective promotion of the website. It takes a couple of visit for a user to believe a site merits returning on a regular basis so it takes some time for repeat traffic to develop. So look at the trend and the individual period to better interpret your unique visitors.

• New visitors: This statistic is the best overall indicator of how fast your traffic is growing.  New visitors represent the untapped potential of the marketplace and following what new visitors do on your website gives you great marketing information.  If your Analytics tool allows you to segment the data, look at landing sites, time spent on the site, and exit pages for new visitors.  This will give you a sense of how valuable they consider your services and the content you provide.

How did people find your site?

• Referring site: If you have increased your directory listings or started a reciprocal blog posting relationship, you would expect links from those sources to increase.
• Traffic source: If you have enhanced your internal, you would expect that your traffic from organic referral sites to increase e.g. Google search by one of your key words.  If you can segment this statistic with you analytics program, look at new visitors for support of this conclusion.

Take a look at your analytics and see what these statistics show you before you look at our blog about interpreting visitor’s traffic pattern. A good analytics package is the key to effectively managing your SEO strategy, so if you haven’t installed one yet, make sure you do so you can follow the changing traffic trends.

Step by Step SEO to Measure Website Effectiveness

So you want to get noticed online for all the right reasons? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the set of tools and strategies for getting people to discover your website based on its content. Most articles you read about SEO stop there after describing the technical stuff. But good SEO is tied to your online marketing strategy. It is really important for you to be able to attract people to your website who will benefit from being there and likewise create some benefit for you as well.

So we are starting a series of step-by-step SEO blogs that will provide you a plan for novices (and others) to understand, evaluate and think strategically about SEO. If you’ve been wondering how to implement an SEO strategy, just check in every Monday for the next step in our SEO series.

Today’s blog provides a plain English definition of terms important to SEO. Future blogs will take you through each of these areas and explain why they are important, and how to incorporate them into your SEO strategy.

• Analytics program: This is a tool that provide statistical information about activity on your website. It is provided free by your hosting company or by another online service such as Google.
• Hits: This was a term used early on in the web world to indicate how many visitors came to a site. Hits are actually NOT a visitor count. Hits are the number of files downloaded from a server when a page is called for. So if you have an HTML page that has 10 photos on it, when somebody types in that page URL, there will be 11 hits to the server (1 HTML page + 10 photo images).
• Visitor count: This is the number of distinct visitors who have visited at least one page on your site. It is measured by the IP address (Internet connection point) assigned to one computer. So practically speaking, two people could share a computer and it would only count for one visitor. But generally speaking, this is a good indicator of how many people view your site.
• Unique visitors: If a person visits your site on different days during the same period, this is counted twice in the visitor count. To measure unique visitors, your analytic program adjusts for this and counts each IP address once.
• New visitors: This is the number of new IP addresses that view a page on a site during a particular period. This means that since the inception of your analytics software, this IP address has not visited up until this point.
• Page views per visit: This is the average number of pages that a visitor views before leaving a website. Depending on your analytic program, you may see this as an average of all visitors or you may be able to get data distinguished by some other criteria e.g. new visitors.
• Bounce rate: If a visitor views your site and leaves immediately, you will have a high bounce rate. There is no set standard about how fast this must happened before a visitor has “bounced.” However most experts agree that visitors typically will leave after 15 seconds if they don’t believe a website is interesting to them. It is said that a high bounce rate is an indication that your site does not pertain to the information the individual is seeking. A high bounce rate could be an indication of a poorly designed site, insufficient content, or poor SEO bringing in people from keywords that are not relevant.
• Time on the site: This is just what it sounds like and your analytics program may have a way to view additional variables in combination with this e.g. unique visitors.
• Top Content: This is information about the most popular pages on a website. Typically an analytics program will sort the pages and display how many people visited the page in numbers and percentage of all visitors.
• Page views: This is the official term for number of pages viewed on the site.
• Referring site: If a viewer does not type your URL directly into their browser to arrive at your site, they must have found a link on another site or used a search engine to discover your website. The site that provides the link to your website is called the referring site.
• Traffic source: This indicates whether the person came from a link on another site, from a search engine, social media site, etc. The traffic source tells you the types of sites that are referring your readers, while the referring site gives the actual URL of the source.
• Landing pages: This is information about the first page that visitors arrive at when they come to your site. In other words, they may not come to your site through the home page, but the link they followed may lead directly to a page within your site.
• Exit pages: This tells you the page visitors were looking at right before they left your site. This information ties into the bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, look at your exit pages and see where people are leaving.
• Organic search: This is a term used to describe a search that is based only on keywords. This means that the results are not influenced by paid advertising or other factors.

Learn SEO From Your Competitors

SEO can be a confusing and time-intense process, and many of our clients ask over and over where they should focus next. While it would be great if we could implement dozens of SEO tasks, the truth is, it’s much easier to focus on one or two directions at a time. Your search engine competitors can be a wealth of information for honing your SEO strategy.

Find your search engine competitors

Search engine competitors are different than industry competitors. Search engine competitors are the URLs that come up when you search using the keywords you are optimizing for. They may or may not be in your same industry, they are simply the sites that come up based on the search terms entered.

For example, let’s say you provide water damage restoration services. You might search under “water restoration” and see who comes up at the top of Google. The sites who come up on top are your search engine competitors. When I type in this term, I get companies that provide these services, but also an insurance company ranked at #3. So they are your search engine competitor, even though their company does not provide the same services.

If you want to hone in a more localized search, you might put in “water damage Los Angeles” and see who your search engine competitors are for a localized search. It is easier to rank for a localized search, so if you are not well indexed, I would start by analyzing local search engine competitors.

What do I do when I find my competitors?

Choose 2-3 competitors whose sites have good SEO ranking. Once you have made your choice, use the following criteria to analyze the SEO optimization of their website:

1) Content: Where are they using keywords in their content. Use these free keyword density tools to analyze the content and see what the percentage of occurrence is for important keywords. Have they done anything clever with their content in order to weave in keywords. For example, perhaps they show a map with links to city names in order to help get optimized for specific locals.

2) Meta Tags: Right click on the web page and select “view source” in order to see the HTML code for the page. At the very top of the page you will see meta tag information for that specific page. Here you can see if they have input keyword and description meta information to let the search engines know more about the page. SEO rumor has it that this information is no longer important for search engine ranking, but analyze your competitor’s sites to be sure. If they aren’t using it, and they are ranking high, chances are you can skip it too.

3) Title: The title of the page is considered the most important SEO element above all else on the page. The title is at the very top of the browser window, not necessarily the headline shown within the body content of the page. It is important to include keywords in your title. How well have they integrated the keywords into the page title?

4) Heading Tags: Otherwise known as H1, H2 and H3 tags, heading tags on a page are considered more important content than the regular body text. Does your competitor use these heading tags in order to highlight content? If so, have the woven in their keywords? What keywords have they used?

5) Inline links: Inline links refer to links within body text. Joomla web design is an inline link to the Landau Design website using the words “Joomla web design”. Search engines consider inline links to be much more important than non-linked text. Inline links from body content are the most valuable types of in-bound links for your site (if they come from a page that is of relevant content). Does your competitor use inline links to interlink content on their site which would emphasize specific keywords to help with indexing?

6) Content for SEO: Do they have information on their site that boosts their keyword optimization? For example, if they  provide business coaching for entrepreneurs, do they have articles on their site that talk about business growth strategies?  Do they have a blog that is always adding additional content, which would further index them under optimum keywords?

7) Research their in-bound links: We’ve never found a tool that is 100% reliable for this, but it’s worth it to use some of the tools out there to discover your competitor’s in-bound links. Researching inbound links gives you an idea of how many links they have coming into their website. Read Building on Your Competitor’s Links to learn how to find and utilize this information.

Conclusion

Your competitors can teach you a lot about SEO, and give you a clear direction for where to focus your SEO efforts. We would suggest choosing one competitor each week whose site you analyze in order to glean new ideas for your own SEO strategy.