oday I want to talk about a powerful way to improve your rank with the search engines so more people can find your business.
If you’ve ever gone or even watched someone mountain climbing, you know that to get to the top takes strategy.
You carefully look for the best rock or crevice to grab onto, find a place to plant your foot and slowly make your way up the side of the mountain.
One faulty step can cause you to lose a lot of ground—quickly.
This reminds me of SEO link building.
Done methodically, you can drive traffic and watch your Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search ranking climb higher.
However if it’s not well thought out and well executed, with one bad move you can fall fast and furious in the search engine rankings.
If you’re not familiar with SEO link building, it is one of the primary elements search engines look at when determining the value of your site and where they rank it on their search engine results page.
Link building is the act of getting other websites to link to you. Each link acts like a vote. The more votes that your website receives, the better you will rank. Without links, your site won’t get the authority it needs to rank higher organically.
To avoid being penalized by Google and other search engines there are several things you need to focus on:
Construct high-quality one-way inbound links. When you have quality in-bound links, you build authority in your niche and are viewed by Google as a more credible, valuable and relevant site.
To determine if your links are high quality, ask yourself the following questions:
What is the reputation of the site I’m getting links from? Trusted sites linking to you using the keyword or product name you are trying to rank for helps build authority in your niche. For example, if you have a business-related site and Forbes.com linked to your site it would be more valuable than a site that was less well-known or had a lower PR (Page Rank). Also, links from .edu and .gov sites are considered more credible and valuable than .com, .net or .org links.
How relevant is the anchor text to this link? A generic link such as www.yourcompany.com or a link with your product name only, is not as valuable as one which includes both your product name or target keyword and the credible site. For instance, www.Forbes.com/yourproduct. Or if that’s not possible, a link that has your product name or target keyword is more valuable than “click here.”
Build links naturally and slowly. You should have a clear, methodical and precise strategy for how you will attract links to your site.
Spend time developing interesting, valuable content that stimulates conversations in blogs, forums and social media. Make sure that you plan this out rather than trying to follow a “cookie-cutter” strategy or randomly piecing things together. Reciprocal link exchanges and getting cheap links from “farms” doesn’t work and can damage your credibility.
Create great content and tools. Develop a reputation for writing content and offering tools and widgets that create value. Writing something just to get content up on your site that doesn’t stir up some sort of response or placing a widget that isn’t in some way useful to your audience is a waste of your time and effort. More importantly, it’s a waste of your customer’s time.
Provide content that stimulates conversation and comments. Ask your readers to participate by creating an action step in everything you write. You’ll find your traffic increases because you’ve developed a reputation for sharing great information and tools. Plus people will start conversations, link to you and share your articles on social media sites.
Put up boring, irrelevant content and worthless tools, and people will not only stop visiting your site, but you’ll develop a bad reputation which is hard to overcome.
Develop a hierarchical structure. Instead of loading up every page with tons of navigational links in the hope that something sticks, create a structure that emphasizes your most important content.
For example, your home page and pages with content that leads to revenue conversion will most likely contain your most important content so they should be at the top of your structure. This is what people will look at first and will lead them to take action.
Part of your structure should also include creating internal page links which link from keywords on your site to other pages on your site. This not only can significantly impact search engine rankings and search “crawlability”, but it also makes it easier for your consumers to “get around” and find what they are looking for, enhancing their user experience.
Take time to develop a great link building strategy and you’ll build your traffic, increase your visibility with search engines and improve your reputation in your niche.
Remember that the process matters. Using gimmicks, spamming blogs and forums, or loading up pages with hundreds of navigational links will only waste your time and effort and could risk your website being penalized by search engines, causing your website to fall drastically in the rankings.
The good news is it’s possible to build your traffic (and your profits) using a well thought out, well planned SEO link building strategy. It may take some time and effort, but remember, Edmond Hillary didn’t get to the top of Mount Everest without a lot of planning and a slow, measured, strategic climb to the top.
If you take the same approach, you’ll reach the top of the search engine rankings too, plus it’ll be a lot more profitable than Edmond Hillary’s climb too!
To your online success,
John Pfeiffer
P.S. Remember, if you want to rank organically and hold the highest rank over time, you must be in this for the long haul…because even though you achieve the top spot doesn’t mean your competitors will stop adding links and trying to knock you off. So if you want to learn more, just give me a call at 1-800-861-3776 or send me an email with your questions.