Online Marketing 7 - Link Building

The most important thing for your website is to get it noticed by the search engines. So you certainly won't hurt your cause by submitting your new site to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most of the smaller search engines take their info from one of those big three, so that will help anyway.

Then there's YouTube and the other video sites like Vimeo and Google Video, which we'll look at another time. YouTube, by the way, is now the second most popular 'search engine' after Google, at least in the UK...

But submitting your site doesn't guarantee that Google will even index it (add it to its list of billions of sites), let alone give it a good ranking and a high position in the search results.

So you need another strategy to make the Google spiders find your site, and that's linking from sites that Google already visits. The more popular and dynamic a site, the more often Google will visit it. That equates pretty closely to the site's PageRank and that gives increased value to any relevant links from that site.

So, build your links from sites that Google already likes and visits often. You can see when a spider last visited a site by clicking on the 'cached' link for that site in the search results. The more recent that cache is, the more often Google probably visits.

But just linking once, even to a very popular and active site isn't enough. Google has now publicly stated that recent links count far more tan older ones. Indeed, very old links are pretty much ignored. Which means you need to keep adding new links and renewing or replacing old ones to show them that your site is highly sought-after and that people are still keen to link to it (even though it's you who actually adds the links).

On that subject, it's likely that links added within the content of another site - ie, by the site owner - will one day count for more than those added by visitors or users, but I haven't seen Google say that yet. It probably isn't easy to discriminate between 'owner added' and 'user added' links but I wouldn't put anything beyond the geeks at Google!

So, it's probably going to be worth actually talking to website owners and negotiating an embedded link, but for now, keep building your links from any relevant site you can.

There is software available to automate much of the link-building process and we'll look at that in the near future. Meanwhile, try to add a few backlinks each week, as a minimum.

Roy

Online Marketing 6 - Some Changes

The world of Search Engine Optimisation and online marketing in general is constantly changing, although our Bury St Edmunds online customers needn't worry - that's what we're here for...

But if you're following SEO advice from even six months ago you might be doing a few things you needn't bother with and damaging your website's ranking by ignoring some important issues.

For example, metatags. If you're not familiar with these, they're a kind of labelling system that website designers use in the coding of a site. Human readers don't see them but search engine spiders do, and they use them to assess a website's 'relevancy'. One of the most obvious ways to start optimising a site, apart from the web copy itself, is by inserting as many keywords as possible in the 'keyword tags'.

But, back in November 2009, Google confirmed they no longer took any notice of keyword tags in assessing a website's relevance and ranking. They don't count at all any more. That's a pretty big change and one that not all SEO 'experts' have spotted yet.

It won't hurt to add keywords to the keyword tags, and it's not yet clear if Bing and Yahoo spiders still use them, or if Google will start attaching some weight to them in the future, but for now, Google ignores them.

A second example is speed of loading. Google is committed to giving users the best possible experience, and that includes not having to wait too long while a page loads. Now, it's always been a bad idea to keep your prospects waiting and we all know by now that people have even shorter attention spans online than they do with their TV remote, but now Google is taking action , too.

So now, if your web pages are slow to load, Google will punish you by reducing your site's PageRank accordingly. That will mean a lower position in the results if your competitors' sites load more quickly than yours.

This means you won't just lose customers through boredom, you could miss out on them visiting your site at all.

So if your website designer wants to include loads of slow to load features like flash and huge image files, because they 'look good', just say 'No!'

It's important that you keep up to date with SEO and remember to keep building those links - there's some vitally important information now emerging about linking strategies that I'll bring you next time.

Roy

Online Marketing 5 - Optimised Listings

In our experiment for online marketing in Bury St Edmunds we spent a lot of time researching directories and building links as we went. It paid off, as you probably know.

We found that there are probably hundreds of directories and similar sites where you can list your company or service, so obviously I can't go into detail about exactly what to put in each field on every one of them!

What I can do here is give you some general advice and a few tips on the finer points of using directories to build backlinks to your site.

First of all, a directory that doesn't let you include backlinks is probably a waste of your time. A few of them might have enough traffic to justify listing your company with them, because they might bring some customers to your site, but generally, if you can't include a backlink, move on.

Secondly, a 'deep link' to the optimised page on your site is worth more than a link to your index page, unless they are one and the same. That should really only happen if you have a one-page site (or maybe one content page and some about us info on another page). So if you can add a deep link, always do so. Some directories even allow you several links, and you should definitely take full advantage of those.

Where you can include embedded links in your company description, use anchor text (the actual words highlighted as a link) that includes your target key phrase. Where you can add tags or labels, use your key phrase there as well. Use the key phrase in the rest of your description and heading if there is one.

Link building should be a continuing process. Adding loads of links very quickly is probably worse than adding the same number over a week or two. Worse still is adding plenty of links and then just stopping as though your work is done. This gives the wrong kind of signal to the search engines. In fact it's a sure sign you were trying to work the system, so you need to be consistent and keep adding or getting links to make your list-building look as natural and 'organic' as possible.

There are plenty of sites you can link from, so there's no reason to stop, even if you just add one link a week from now on. Keep at it and you should be able to keep your website where it belongs!

Incidentally, there's some new research just out that shows the relative importance of various factors in optimisation, especially in relation to Google. There are a few surprises and maybe a bit of controversy, too, and I'll look at that next time.

Roy