SEO Part II – Building Relationships…
(Looking for Part I? Here you go: The Top 3 SEO Tips and Tricks)
Links! Links! Links! I say!
The Chains that Bind...
That is what you hear, and it is correct for the most part – at least it is partially true. But before you go off to every social site on the planet to build back-link love, you might want to concentrate on the most important part…
Content.
If your content sucks (and there are so many ways that it can suck) your links are worthless. Yes, I know someone is shouting that there are tons of horrible sites that are currently getting good SERPS or even have a high PR – but don’t count on that happening for too much longer now that Google has started using their new Caffeine algorithms. The other search engines are sure to follow suit. Content is King, and it will remain king.
That being said, you still do need to know how to build good back links. So how do you do this?
Well, lets look closer at what a link actually is – it represents on its most basic level a relationship. It is a relationship between one site and another – and it should represent a relationship that brings value, hopefully to both sites.
And that in a nutshell, what Google and all the other search engines are trying to tell you with the search results you gather. Their whole reason for creating ever more complex algorithms is to bring the searcher just such results. For much of the time it has been marketers intention to game that system (not all marketers, but many).
So, here is my 2 cents on how to gain good SEO, and before I go on, let me challenge you. Go to Google and type in “The Top 3 Copywriting” – and you will see that I hold both the number 1 and number 2 position for that key-phrase (as of the writing of this post Jan 28th). I do know a bit about what I am talking about. (By the way I currently have the number 3 position for “The Top 3 SEO” -not too bad eh?).
Other than good content, highly targeted keywords and key-phrases are a necessity. Make sure they are in your content. If your domain name has your keywords all the better (actually that is a real good help when starting out, but gets less important as you add content and good links).
Back-links from high PR sites: This goes without saying, but if you can get back-links from highly rated sites such as high traffic forums, blogs, and social networks, that is going to bring a nice bit of PR juice to your site. You can also use reciprocal sites, however the juice goes both ways there and you build up more slowly (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Traffic. Google monitors the traffic to your site, and the more you have the higher your rating – yes, I know, that is a bit of a catch-22, I need ratings to get traffic, and I need traffic to get ratings! What to do!
Go back to the basics, that’s what. Submit your site to every search engine including some of the specialty search sites (check out Search Engine Watch for lists of these at: searchenginewatch.com).
But you simply cannot beat real relationship links. Just like business in the real world where you network with real people, on the net is no different. Behind every one of those great sites are great people – get to know them, perhaps by posting good commentary on their blogs, and eventually becoming a guest contributor. Guess what, that kind of link is very powerful!
You can, of course, go the latest fad – massive spider-webs of low value links from dozens of social web-sites, “Link-Wheels”, etc. That stuff can bring some immediate impact, but search engines are getting wise to these synthetic methods and are even penalizing and de-indexing sites in some cases because of it.
The truth is, if your site has real value – you will have real valuable visitors. In the end, traffic is not as important as paying customers, and a lower volume but steady stream of paying customers is way more valuable than a massive stream of traffic that buys nothing. And that is true any day.
-David T. McKee
