SEO Link Strategies

by admin on March 11, 2010

Understanding links:

The value of links in the practice of SEO is incredibly high. Once the basics of SEO such as keyword usage in the title, H1 and content have been addressed we need to turn our attention to the use of links.

It is important to mention here that when we talk about linking for SEO we mean “text” links. Text links are hyperlinks that use keywords in the link text that specifically supports the content of the page destination of the link. The easy example is a link where the term “chicken recipe” points to a page with chicken recipe content. The common mistake is where there is a link pointing to the destination pages contains the text “click here” for more information. This link does little to tell the search engine crawlers what to expect when it crawls the destination page.

Links fall into 2 main categories with each having its own significance. The first of the two types of links is the “internal link“. The internal link is one that points to other pages within a site property. The reason that these are important is that they help both the website visitor (especially the web crawler) to easily navigate the site by being able to see and easily move to the related content. These important links contain keywords that help to support the content on both the page containing the link and the destination page. What we want to avoid is using links that contain the generic term such as “click here” or “link” which do nothing to support the page from an SEO viewpoint.

The second category of links is “external links“. External links are those links that point to a page from outside of a web property. The most obvious of this type of link is one coming from a press release or article on a news site. These links are often the most easy to create when there is a significant news story, product release or event. The advantage that an external link provides is that it provides external validation that there is worthwhile content at the destination page. Search engine crawlers look at these links like “votes” as a way to help rate the value of the destination page. The more authoritative (important) and contextually relevant the site having your link, the higher the value of your page. All of these factors combine to support the pages position on the SERP (search engine results page).

How to get external links:

There are a number of approaches for acquiring external links. The approaches range from clean and ethical to marginal to unethical or sometimes referred to as “black hat” techniques. One of the most common and ethical approaches is to use PR to create links from high value news and editorial websites. This method involves placing targeted keyword links within the press release copy. This techniques works well for carefully written releases where the editors can simply “copy-n-paste” the content of the release in whole or in part directly onto their websites. If multiplied by hundreds of news outlets, this can translate into hundreds of text links pointing to your pages using your target keywords in a matter of just a few days. There are both free and paid press release wire services you can use to distribute a PR release.

Footer Links:
Gone are the days of the link farms where sites created pages consisting of website links that pointed to sites that exchanged a link back to the link farm site. This practice is called reciprocal linking and is considered to be of little SEO value. The technique of creating links within a family of websites requires that all of the links be one-way and are considered as a much better indicator of link value. One such technique is the use of a ”partner footer” where the partners link in one direction to other partner sites. The footer links are carefully planned so as to point in one direction and avoid the reciprocal link penalty.

Social Media Links:
Good sources of links abound in social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. These sites allow users to talk and share with networked contacts through an interactive interface and provide a way to share website links. In some cases this technique can yield an increasing number of inbound links depending on the level of network activity.

Paid Links:
The idea of paying for links to a site is frowned upon by all of the search engines but it still happens. This practice is a way to get good relevant links from a number of medium to high page rank sites in order to raise a page’s value to the search engines. This can become cost prohibitive if this is done for a high number of pages. It is unclear what the search engines will do to a set of pages that they catch participating in this practice but the worst case is to remove the offending sites from their indexes.

Creating Link Bait:
The term “Link Bait” is pretty obvious and is essentially writing compelling content that other web users will want to link to and share. This has created a whole new industry for content developers and aggregators. You can pay these companies to have their editors write a unique, compelling and keyword rich article that will attract a great deal of links.  Well crafted original content and sometimes well arranged aggregated content can become an excellent way to attract hundreds of links. This is what has happened with many community sites where collections of relevant create a valuable resource for web visitors and make great link bait.

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Top Six SEO Tactics

by admin on February 19, 2010

This article is an explanation of my top 6 SEO tactics that yield the highest return in terms of organic search relevance. This is by no means an exhaustive list as there are many more tactics but, I felt that it is important to explain these initial tactics for the novice search marketer.

The basic premise of Search Engine Optimization is to look at each webpage in much the same way as a search engine. The engines like people want to provide the best possible “result” in this case for a given query. The search engines (SE) will do this by crawling the page and look at key page elements that expose the main content focus of the page. Unfortunately, we all want to be marketers and tend to try to tell too much of the “story” and end up overloading our webpages with content and this tends to confuse the crawlers as to the focus of a given webpage.

Starting with the concept of looking at a given page like a search engine we need to understand the focus of a webpage. If you look at a given webpage you realize that there is a particular topic (content) focus of the page. The engine is looking to pull the primary content focus from each webpage and add it into the search engine “index“. Our aim is to simplify this process for the crawlers by applying specific tactics to the target webpages. This allows the crawler to easily capture the focus of the page index the content and have it appear prominently in the search engine results page (SERP).

1.    The first tactic for simplifying this process is to select the keyword or keyword phrase that best describes the content on the webpage. Once the keyword or phrase is selected need to place this term into the webpage “title” tag. The page title appears in the top of the browser or browser tab (depending on the web browser client) and is the primary link within the organic (SERP). This is done in the HTML code and is the #1 indicator of the content focus of the webpage and the #1 element the crawler looks to to determine the content focus of the page.

2.    The second SEO tactic is to provide to the crawler with a compelling short description of the webpage content. The best way to do this is by creating a good “Meta Description“. The Meta Description is not part of the visible webpage content but is a key element that the crawler uses in providing the description of the title link in the (SERP). It is important to mention that the crawler will first try to pull this from the webpage text but, if it cannot extract a compelling phrase to describe the webpage it will default to the Meta Description. If there is no Meta Description the search result snippet will often be a mixed bag of text containing term from the keyword or phrase. The opportunity here is that by providing a focused Meta description the author can include a “call-to-action” similar to ones used in sponsored listings. This simple tactic can mean the difference between choosing your link over the competitor.

3.    The third SEO tactic is where we begin to focus on the actual webpage content. In this tactic we simply place the target keyword into the primary page content heading or H1 tag. Sounds easy but this will always depend on the content. In my initial analysis of Ask.com content I found that many pages had heading text but this text was not designated as the H1 and therefore is seen as less important by the web crawlers. On the surface this does not not look like a big issue yet you will find it is very important for SEO keyword importance.

4.    The fourth SEO tactic is to simply use the keyword or phrase several times in the body of the webpage text. This may sound like a “big duh”, well you would be surprised at how many times in the course of creating a webpage that this simple rule gets left out. This tactic of placing the target keyword into the webpage text creates what is referred to as “keyword density” and is just another way to inform the search engines the content focus of the particular webpage.

5.    The 5th SEO tactic again involves the webpage content. In this tactic we use hyperlinks to enhance the how the content on multiple pages work together. Using text (keyword) based hyperlinks the content can support or be supported across multiple pages on a website. If you compared this to physical textbook these links amount to page references that tell the reader to go to a specific section of the book to get more information about the referenced topic. Again, the search engines want to provide the best result and it uses several ways to make sure the content is of a good quality.

6.    The 6th SEO tactic in the “Top 6 Picks” is not related to the webpage content but instead is focused on insuring the webpage URL in in the search index. In this tactic we create a text based sitemap which is basically a simple list of URLs we want the search engines to crawl and index. Once created we submit the sitemap to the engines through a set of tools they provide specifically for this purpose.

On-Page Factors: The on-page factors are those elements of the page that effect the SEO performance based on keyword relevance.

1. Title Tags:
2. Heading (H1) Tags
3. Meta Descriptions
4. Body Copy
5. Text Links
6. Alt Tags

There more to talk about here but I think this is a good primer for understanding SEO tactics.

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New Blog, New Site…

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