Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the fastest moving industries I have ever been involved in, yet one core activity seems to consistently dominate – link building. Even though link building methods and trends change, the basic principle remains the same. How can you maximise the effectiveness of your link building campaign and future proof your link building strategies for 2010?

Obtaining Links from Highly Respected Pages

The key to effective link building depends on you being able to identify high ranking sites that might host a link to your site, whether they are business directories or other websites. Factors such as Google Page Rank will play a smaller role than in previous years, but still give a good indication as to Google’s opinion of the site. A small handful of good links from some very highly ranked and popular sites will always be more effective than hundreds of links from unpopular ones with no page rank.

Making the Most of Social Media

As social media plays a more central role to SEO, all those essential inbound links from your Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon accounts will start to carry more and more clout. Google often uses your article’s success with the native users of social sites when deciding how to rank it for the broader masses.  Clearly and article with 157 Diggs is going to have wider appeal and is likely to be more popular than one with 3. Google pays keen attention to these, making it important for you to get involved in social media in 2010.

Keeping Your Links Context Relevant

An often overlooked factor in any link building campaign is the relevance of your site to the linking one. Links that offer further information about a topic will not only conduct better traffic, but will have a greater impact on your SEO.  Keep your links within the same language as your site, and find reasons why people will benefit from your link.  For every product and service, there is usually a fan base, or enthusiast group waiting to be tapped in to. Are there any popular forums or discussion boards relevant to your products or services? Perhaps you might place an add in an online magazine for your industry? Sometimes the way to do this, is to post a comment and get involved.  Many free sites and comment systems allow you to include a signature, or a website URL in a profile or comment. ( Be sure to check the site terms and conditions, as different webmasters will place different rules around promoting sites! )

Maximising Your Naturally Generated Links from Good Content

A website with useful and informative content will naturally pick up inbound links that other users add. It is easy to convince yourself that this is down to others, and cannot easily be influenced from your site itself. But there are some simple rules that will help you maximise this area. All you really need to do is consider what you can offer people, which they cannot easily find elsewhere. As an expert in your industry, this might be anything from inside product information, industry news or practical tips about a product or service. If you can think of at least one type of person who would benefit from this knowledge, then write it! More content is always a good thing.

Be Aware of Creative or Hidden Link Building Opportunities

Often there are neat sites which you can obtain links from easily. Does your domain have an entry at www.aboutus.org? Have you a review on www.reviewcentre.com? There are also domain information and company information sites that are readily indexed by Google, and by taking five minutes to create an entry for your company or website, you will be generating some more informative, permanent back links that will improve the profile of your website.

In a nut shell, link building is almost a science in itself. You cannot go far wrong, provided you don’t add any links from spam websites, or websites of a different language.  By keeping mindful of where you might add links to your site – and never losing sight of the people who would benefit from this, you will maximising the effectiveness of each and every link added and contribute to the structure of the web itself.

Did you realise that your website text will determine the type of visitors you get? It is something that few business owners realise, and yet it’s one of the most important factors affecting your SEO (search engine optimisation). How can you be sure you are getting visitors that are likely to turn into customers? The essentials are so simple, you will understand them by the time you finish reading this post!

The Secret of Content Rich Documents

If you run an online shop, it is tempting to rely heavily on the pictures and imagery of the products to do the selling. But without any text, search engines will not know what they can recommend your page for, and nobody will even see them!

Descriptive Text and Page Titles

Let’s suppose you sell hats, getting to the top of Google for this phrase by itself will be difficult, and probably not all that helpful. Most searchers will already have an idea of the product they want (even if they may not have included it in their search query). If you win the click for ‘hats’, many of those clicks will be hard to keep because the user might be looking for a particular type of hat which you may not even stock! If too many people leave quickly (‘bounce’) this will start to have a negative impact on your websites rank.

By including a more detailed description, you can expect your pages to rank for more specific searches which will not only satisfy the users search, but will also be more likely to convert into a sale! Do you sell ‘wool hats’? Have you talked about the colour or design? Is there a clothing label or designer brand that has a strong identity which you could mention? Are they suitable for special occasions which you could spend a few sentences talking about? Do you stock party hats or fancy dress hats? Even the simplest product deserves a good description. If you cannot easily include the text with the product, perhaps you could have a separate series of information or help pages which link directly through to your product? It will help the search engines find a better search phrase that will bring you traffic. Remember :- if you don’t include the detail, you won’t be included in the search!

Giving Your Audience Helpful Information

Google’s job evolves around recommending websites that searchers will find useful. If your industry is quite competitive and you are finding it difficult to generate traffic, there are several neat ways you can get around this. Google only has 10 top spots, so it must choose the 10 most useful sites for each phrase. By improving the quality of information your website provides, you will be improving the overall performance of your site. Maybe you could include product reviews, advice or how-tos. Perhaps you could get users involved in discussing the product? Does it have a fan base you could somehow utilise? Would  Social Media be the way to tap into this traffic reservoir? If you have any informative PDF documents already (perhaps technical specifications, help manuals or product information pamphlets), it would be worth making those available on your site. Google will happily index these exactly like it reads regular web pages and this extra content will count in your favour.

Being Aware of Trending Topics

All sorts of interesting factors affect what people talk and write about. The Internet is just like other mediums – any big stories in the news headlines will stimulate search and readers. Is there some way you could utilise this? If you have a news or blog section you can use this to promote yourself. Because blogs are indexed sooner, you will find these more responsive and able to respond to sudden changes in peoples search habits.

In a nutshell, Google will reward you for including any information your visitors might find useful. As an expert in your industry, only you truly understand your potential customer base. Consider your competitor sites and ask yourself what you could do better!

The world is constantly changing, and nowhere is this happening faster than the Internet. One growing trend is the number of people taking advantage of social media to promote their businesses and products. Yet so many people have trouble understanding how social media can benefit them, particularly in small to medium sized businesses where budgets are tight and time is a rare commodity you can’t afford to waste. If you have heard people talk of Twitter, blogs, Youtube and Facebook but have no idea how this would fit into the context of your industry and business, then read on! This post will reveal how some simple, free (and, quite honestly … fun!) tactics can be used to really enhance your search engine optimisation (SEO) and business profile on the web and how you can ensure your time is spent effectively.

 

How Blogs Can Work for Your Business

An increasing number of people are blogging for business, why? Well, firstly search engines love rolling content and news pages. Unlike static web pages, the benefit of a news or blog section comes from the regularly updated content and steady stream of informative articles. The great part is you can write about anything that takes your fancy, provided it is somehow related to your industry, business or products. Although you may not realise, you probably have a wealth of knowledge which the average Joe Public would need to do some serious Wiki-ing to unearth. By gradually releasing little bits of this knowledge on a regular basis, you will give search engines a very good reason to see you as an authoritative source of news and will quickly find your articles ranking well for related search terms. Blogs can be used to announce the launch of your new products, perhaps offer a review and some customer feedback or advice, or it might cover events happening in your industry or even company news. Whatever your niche, try to think about your customers and imagine what type of information they would find useful. Provided you can think of at least one type of person who would be moderately interested, you should write it!

Blogging Opens the Twitter Door

Once you are comfortable adding to your blog, the next logical step is building up your company’s official Twitter account. Twitter is so easy to use and so effective at promoting websites that some people often accuse it of being one giant spam machine. The goal is finding as many genuine followers as possible, each of who will see any updates you post. You can post short snippets of news, or links to articles in your blog. Each time you add a new blog entry, be sure to copy and paste the address of your new post into your Twitter update bar with a little text describing the article. It becomes a source of clicks for people who are interested in the headline, and there are some fantastic Twitter applications appearing that will help kick-start and manage your account. Twittgeek.com will automatically follow people based on a keyword you choose. The great thing about this is that it ensures your message reaches people who have Tweeted about this topic in the past and are most likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Social Media SEO, Social Bookmarking and Article Back-links

There are some great sites out there besides Twitter that you should be submitting each article to, instead of building links for your site itself, you will be building links for your individual articles. Each site has a certain ‘knack’ to really get the most out of your social media SEO, but all are very easy to pick up and you will often find you get used to them by simply using them. A lot of SEO experts will slate digg.com because ‘power users really need to digg your article to really feel a big effect, but there are other advantages – Digg articles themselves will often rank very quickly in Google separately from your site, and when enough people click through from your Digg entry through to your actual blog entry, eventually Google will see it should be recommending your blog page high up, and will often ‘flip’ the URLs, giving you a chance to rank for some quite competitive terms if your article is an interesting enough read. Reddit.com entries will generally not rank very well in Google, but has a fantastic number of users and does not insist on categories, allowing it to become a neat little traffic source all of it’s own. Be sure to give your articles a full description here in the ‘extra text’ section. You can submit either blog entries or entire sites to Stumble Upon, and it is worth finding several relevant categories for your article if you can! There are other generic social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com, diigo.com, Yahoo Bookmarks and Google Bookmarks that are worth using.

Making Facebook and Youtube Work For you

Facebook now allows organisations and companies to open up official Facebook accounts. This is something else that is quick to do, and quite a lot of fun. Be sure to make all employees are members of the group, so that all can contribute to your Facebook profile. Also, be sure to link back to your site and post any links to articles here too! Similarly, some may find themselves in industries where they have videos that might be uploaded to Youtube. Remember, that plenty of people use YouTube on a regular basis, and it would be worth including a link back to your site from the description of each YouTube video you post. You can also embed videos from YouTube into your site fairly easily.

Why Social Media is Best Done Yourself

In a nutshell, there are some more expensive SEO companies who will provide the social media side of SEO as part of the service. But my advice would be that social media SEO is something best done yourself. Why? Well, only you have the industry insider knowledge and deal with your customers on a regular basis, and will therefore understand them better than any SEO consultant. It is also completely free to do your social media SEO, and allocating just one hour each day, or perhaps a couple of hours each week is enough to really see a noticeable impact on your SEO.

There are so many different considerations when building a new site: getting your branding and colour scheme right, creating a usable layout and navigation. These are all important, but there is one little chap who often gets completely overlooked. How you break up your information and content across pages will not only determine what type of visitors you attract, but will also have an impact on the time spent on your pages themselves, and therefore the success of your search engine optimisation (SEO) itself.
 

Understanding Your Audience Through Keywords

When I’m sat at home watching TV, the advertiser doesn’t know me from Geoff. I’m only here because the scheduled program was of some interest. Outside of this, potential advertisers know very little about me. This is where the Web is utterly different. Each visitor who lands on your page, came from somewhere. Think about it: If they came from a search engine, then we know their intentions will lie behind the search terms they entered into Google. If they followed a link, then it is likely they saw something on the referring site which led them to believe we can help them out. We already understand something about their desires and purpose and by applying just a little tracking data we might be able to better understand what really makes them tick.

Using Google Analytics to Guide Page Structure

So what does this have to do with page structure, SEO and how you break up your content? Well, I like to imagine each page as an island. While they may share a common purpose and phrases, each will deal with a slightly different topic and can therefore be used to target different searches. Each page needs to be targeted towards a particular audience. Lets suppose you are a plumber who performs everything from central heating to plumbing repair and boiler installation. It would be very tempting to lump a all this information together under a general page ‘services’ which might include lists of statements.  By simply breaking up the different services across pages, and padding the content out with text you will have more room to optimise each page for variations on themes around their target optimisation phrases and this will allow you to deliver highly relevant content, which in turn will improve your bounce rate and therefore the success of your SEO as a whole.

Identifying Content That Works for Your SEO

Looking through your Google Analytic data for low bounce rate phrases people found you for will help you work out which visitors were receptive to your content after entering their search terms. You might refine the optimisation of each page to remove or rephrase terms that have a high bounce. One or two bounces is quite normal, but if you’ve had five or ten visits and have a bounce rate over 75%, this might be caused by optimised search terms that are either slightly ambiguous or perhaps a little vague. It might even be nothing wrong with the content itself, but simply the message includes too much information that is not relevant to your search visitor, who might wrongly conclude you could not satisfy their need because they simply didn’t read far enough down the page! If you add content to the site regularly, keeping track of your tracking data will also help you identify demand for a particular topic and allow you to pitch information you know will work.

Deciding When a New Page Will Help Your SEO

The questions to ask yourself are surprisingly straight forward: “What type of audience is this message aimed at?”, “What will this audience be looking for?” and “What sort of action do I wish to encourage from each type of visitor once they find this page?”. If you allow these questions to govern the structure of your site, you will never go far wrong. If content is king, then how you divide up your Kingdom will determine how effectively each page can work together and will improve the overall quality of your SEO.