The short version of this is that their website sucks ,but let’s take a closer look at some of the common problems in building backlinks.

Quality Content

The entire purpose of a link is to reference something of quality and relevance (I’ll get to that in a second) and somehow that gets looked over by people with they build a website and expect that other website owners will automatically want to link back to them. If you content isn’t coherent and resembles something that was put through an article spinner somewhere then why do you think anyone will want to link to your site?

Definition of Quality

high grade; superiority; excellence

As you can image I get requests for backlinks all the time but 99% of what I receive doesn’t fall into the definition of quality (not by a long shot).

Tip: The quality of your content will determine if someone will be willing to link to you.

Site Relevancy

When I first started doing SEO professionally in 2004 one of the old practices was to do link swap with anyone and everyone. We created large link directories on our sites and tried to get thousands of sites to exchange links with us. We used large networks of sites to build 3 way links to look more natural but ultimately as the internet has progressed that became a waste of time since what our site visitors really wanted was something that was relevant to what they were looking for.

Since then the SEO algorithms have changed a few times and have emphasized the importance of a relevant site linking to you.

Tip: Before having a ton of sites link to you find ones that are relevant and get them to link to you first.

Quantity of Content

It amazes me when I have a client as why their site isn’t ranking well for hundreds of term and they only have 5 pages on their website. The obvious reason is the quantity of the content that they have. Keep in mind that the quality of the content is a given. It has to be good. Site owner often don’t update their sites often enough and think that after they build it once everyone should come running to the site. This just isn’t the case but a lot of website owners think it is.

This may surprise most website owners but most need to increase the quantity of the content that produce. It’s the only way to have massive amount of links pointing back to your site barring a lot of press and media exposure.

Tip: Create a content creation schedule and determine how often you will publish new content to your site.

Just in case you got lost in the reading here’s what you need to do. Produce quality content on a regular basis and find relevant sites to link to you. When all else fails hire an seo.

image credit: ivanpw

This is going to be a short post just pointing out a new change recently with the Google algorithm.

But first I wanted to mention an update on my last post about Google Buzz. There were a lot of concerns about some of the privacy settings and how your information was being used. Google has made various updates and they mention the changes on their blog. Enough said.

A few days ago on the official Google blog they made a post about how webmasters and web site owners could specify your canonical. One of the biggest concerns for anyone that does SEO is that of duplicate content on their website. Now that Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) are going to start supporting the rel=”canonical” tag in the header it makes it easy for Google and the others to slap your website around if you have duplicate content.

For those that aren’t sure what I am referring to here is an example:

• http://micaljohnson.com
• http://www.micaljohnson.com
• http://micaljohnson.com/index.htm

All this links point to the same page and would cause a duplicate content penalty to be served. This is a very simple example. I’ll share more in a moment.

Those of us that use WordPress blogs should be familiar with this because of the way the link structure of the blog works we often times end up with duplicate content. Thankfully the genius wordpress plugin creator Joost de Valk at Yoast.com made a great wordpress plugin to canonical your blog and help eliminate that problem.

Here are a few places to check out to get up to speed on this:

• Yoast.com: Canonical URL links
• Google Blog: About rel=”canonical”

Here is also a video of Google’s Matt Cutts explaining it a little better

From time to time I will get asked the question “If I use a subdomain can I get that ranked with my regular domain url in the SERP (search engine results page)”

What do you think? 

Your opinon counts: leave a comment below

Here are some of the best SEO practices I have heard anyone speak about in a long time. Finally someone is a little verbal about what is wasting your time. The video is by Wil Reynolds( @wilreynolds on twitter) of ThinkSeer.com

Wil Reynolds teaches which SEO practices are no longer used before explaining best SEO practices.

Matt Cutts (@mattcutts on twitter)a Google software engineer answer a question from Monica from Madison, WI who asked:

Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings? If the answer is “Yes” — what is Google’s definition of a brand? Inspired by Aaron Wall’s post:http://www.seobook.com/google-branding

Over the last couple of years deep linking has been one of the buzz words in the SEO discussion forums. The strategy is really simple and with several types of syndication technologies being more widely used it becomes even easier to do.

Many times as people and/or businesses are creating their linking strategies for their prospective web site they focus so much attention on the main index page that the other pages get lost in the shuffle. With every niche having so many keywords to rank for it become difficult to get just one page to rank well for multiple keywords.

One of the best benefits of deep linking is that you can have a page specific for the keyword that you are wanting to rank for. Then by using the keyword in the anchor text you just add additional credibility to your web site.

But it doesn’t stop there, another excellent benefit is getting your web page indexed quicker so that it can actually show up in the search engine results page (SERP). If you use several different syndication methods to promote your content then you will start seeing a ton of backlinks. When that happens the spiders start coming a lot quicker and do a full index of that page sooner rather than later.

Here is a list of places you would want to do deep linking:

• Text link on you own web pages
• Press Releases
• Article Syndication
• RSS Feeds
• Ezine submissions
• Podcasts submissions
• Video submission

By using these various methods of deep linking you can make your life a lot easier.

If you’re in SEO consulting you possibly have been drawn towards using of various seo loopholes.

Maybe you’ve gone grey on more than one occasion.

No doubt often there are arguments over what is grey-hat, white-hat, blue-hat, or black-hat. I’d think there’s a bit of heated conversations about the quick launch of the MSN ranking loophole infoproduct concerning whether the system is really as white-hat as the authors claim.

The 1 page sites actually do in fact appear to be truly white hat. I should warn you that that to claim a particular part of the linking techniques as white-hat is completely ridiculous.

Of course it’s not white hat. There’s nothing grey, white, or blue about it.

It should be said though you don’t have to use that strategy to get the ranking you want in MSN. It is merely a exploit for optimizers who are not afraid of the possible risks it might engender – which seriously – because it’s targeting MSN – really are not that significant seeing as the MSN search engine is quickly losing ground now

No doubt it is tough to pass up an opportunity to rapidly load up basic one page microsites that have great possibilitiies for ranking in the top 3 spots for almost every single keyword phrase you try to get rankings for on a regular basis – and getting those rankings rapidly.

Simply one more may way for acquiring low-cost visitors from MSN in addition to AdCenter.

If you choose to use search engine ranking exploits you are obligated to go over them with your client and detail what you are thinking of doing and the likely risks they create. If you do not, you you might lose not only your repuation, but also your career. And I would think that’s not what you you want to happen.

Bottom line:

If an SEO Consultant wants to use grey hat (marginal) or black hat (against search engine TOS) they shouldn’t use it on a clients web site. If you are doing something like that you are risking your clients hard earned dollars on something that will most likely only work for a little bit but doesn’t add to the long term value of the clients business…DON’T DO IT!

Link Building is one of the most important processes that affect your website’s page ranking on different search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

Link Building = Number of backlinks your web site has =Link Popularity
Link Building = Adds Value + Enhances Page Rank

Reasons for using Link Building service:
• It is an ethical way of increasing your website popularity.
• It is a one-time investment thus saves a lot of advertising expenditure.
• Saves your time.
• Last but not the least, your website link appears on another – the moment it is clicked, it starts earning you business.

Link Quantity vs. quality
If you establish a number of links in your site, it doesn’t mean that you got successful to increase your web traffic. Success in link building depends upon the quality of inbounds links.

Not the quantity of the backlinks,
but the quality of those pages where your link appears is important.

Types of link building
There are three types of link building:-

• One-way - This process is used for establishing only incoming links without displaying the other end’s links on yours, this process is termed as one-way link building or Non-Reciprocal link building .Basically this link building is done through web directory submission, blogs, articles and press releases. In one word, social media is a great medium for one way link building and drawing traffic to the site.

• Two-way – This process is used for submitting your link to other websites and accepting their links on yours in return. This method abides by the “Give and Take” policy. However, one should be cautious while exchanging links with others having the same or higher page rank. It is also known as reciprocal link exchange. Link exchange plays significant roles for any SEO strategy.

• Three-way – Three-way method is operated by involving a third website as a medium for exchanging links between the two websites.

A good SEO company will dispense with superfluous link building services and take care of inbound, outbound and reciprocal links for your website.

I have always looked at the internet and the “Great Equalizer” among businesses large and small. With a little bit of determination and practice even the smallest business would be able to compete and win in the online marketing world. Just by following some really simple rules in SEO you can not only with the keyword battle but win the online war.

That brings me to my question: Can David really beat Goliath?

Everyone is familiar with the Hebrew story of one of the greatest underdog tales of all time. Where David with his sling and stone beat the giant Goliath and won the war. But in the online world the playing field is level, when you follow the rules you get the results. If you are the bigger, smarter and faster business applying sound SEO practices faster and more efficiently then you should be killing your smaller and weaker competition.

But…

Are the online mega-retailers really spending the time needed to do a good job in SEO?

Surprisingly the answer is no. The online magazine Internet Retailers recently released their Top 500 Guide ranking the best online retailers. OneupWeb took the top 100 and did an SEO analysis to see how well they are doing. It then released a report ranking the top 100 Internet Retailers. One of the most interesting things that I found in this free report was that out of the Top 100 online retailers 3 out of 4 are not well optimized!

This was an eye opening realization. The big companies are leaving a lot of money on the table and as a small business you can take advantage of it.

Title Tags are one of the most important onsite SEO factors for achieving ranking. Furthermore, your title tag is what is generally displayed in the search engine results pages, so it is basically the first thing a potential visitor will see before clicking to your site. What you display in your title can greatly impact a visitor’s response to want to see more. Great care should be taken when writing your titles, and they should be compelling enough to call a prospect to action.

Optimizing your titles for direct response and for search engine optimization becomes a delicate balancing act. What may be optimal for visitor click-throughs may not prominently display your targeted keywords for best ranking results. The question is, “Which is more important?”

Search engine optimization is a complex business. Although title tags play a prominent role, it is but one ingredient in the algorithm stew. Sacrificing good ad copy for better positions in the search engine results pages may, in fact, harm your business. What good are rankings if no one clicks on your results?

However, the technicalities of title tags should not be ignored. Every page on a site should always have only one unique title that is relevant to the content on the page. Using the same title on multiple pages will result in duplicate content issues. It is also best to keep within the boundaries of Google’s display limit of 64 characters. If your title is longer than the limit, your title will display a cut off version with multiple trailing dots at the end.

It is often possible to rank for specific keywords even if they don’t appear in the title. Instead, you could focus on other methods like keyword targeted backlinks to a specific page. But if you can write a compelling title that includes the primary keyword for a page, then you can achieve the best of both worlds.