Link Building is Key for SEO

I don’t know about you but my life revolves around building links.  The more links I can get for a website the better chance I have of being listed on the first page of the major search engines.  With the number of people switching their methods of how they find information, getting on the first page of Google is a great way to gain new business. Our Denver SEO company manages several Colorado companies’ search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.  It is our job to handle the link building strategies, make sure traffic is growing and that their online visibility dominates their competition.  Since link building is so crucial I thought I would give a few tips for finding quality links for your website.

1.)    Relevance is Important:  Have you ever been on a website and noticed links for something completely different from the page content or theme of the website?  Chances are you did not click on them because you were not interested in a different subject. (EX –> you did not visit a website about power tools hoping to find information about real estate) Google’s main purpose is to provide accurate search results to keep the web surfers using their search engine.  That being said, we have found that we get more “link juice” from links that are relevant content.  It makes sense right?  If Google’s goal is providing accurate search results, links from sites that are not relevant should not be rewarded as much as those that are from related sources.  Although Google does not come out and say it, our SEO company has found the more links we can get from relevant sites or pieces of content, the better our ranking in the SERPs.

2.)    Make Sure You’re Being Followed:  If you are new to the SEO world you might be shocked to find out that there are links that Google will completely ignore.  There is actually a tag a web developer can include on the link that tells the “Google bots” to skip over the link.  In a search engine optimization campaign it is important to know the difference between a do-follow and no-follow link.  If you spend countless hours building links that are not being scanned by the Google bots you just wasted a bunch of your time.  There are a few ways to tell if a link is a no-follow link.  Check out the source code for the rel=“nofollow” tag or just simply download a toolbar application that will highlight no-follow tagged links.

3.)    The Name of the Game is Numbers: Building backlinks is a numbers game, the more you get the better off you are.  Link building is an ongoing process; if you stop you will fall in the rankings.  Many people find this out the hard way and have to put even more time into their project than they would have had to if they continued to work on it.

4.)    Keywords Are the Key:  If you want to get ahead in the game, make sure you are using your keywords in the links you are creating.  If you are trying to rank for a search term lik “Denver real estate agent” and you do not have any links to your site with that keyword phrase, it will be near impossible to rank well for that term.  A link that has anchor text is much more valuable that the simple www.yoursite.com because you are not telling the search engines or your readers what your site is about.

Hopefully this will help you when thinking about search engine optimization and has helped you understand the value of link building.  Remember, onsite optimization will only take you so far in the search engines.  If you want to show up for competitive keywords, make sure you are using a link building strategy.  If you follow these four tips, you should see a major improvement in your rankings in just a few months.  If you need more help with your search engine optimization campaign, please contact us at our Denver SEO firm (303) 999-7963

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Can alt text really help your SEO campaign?

Often times as I read through all of the resources online for internet marketing, I read about the importance of “on-site” optimization. We have discussed it ourselves in the past (onsite optimization). Something I don’t think we had discussed was the importance of keyword use in the alt text or title tags. Granted many have disagreed with the importance of alt text or title text in the SEO community. It is important to understand that there is not a SEO professional that I have met who knows the algorithms intimately. So while there are many opinions that using alt text or title tags does not provide a benefit to your search engine campaign, I would respectfully disagree as I will prove with an example.

We should probably begin with the explanation of “alt text“. The entire purpose of alt text was to give a description of the image if the image could not be loaded properly as well as a resource for the handicapped (especially the blind) so that as their “text reading” program described and read the page, they would be provided with a description of the image. The attribute can be applied to many different forms of media including video, but is primarily used for images.

So, why bother with alt text on images? As previously stated, alt text will provide screen readers and text readers with a description of the image, this also applies for the spiders that index the content of your website. By labeling images and media with alt text you are giving the search engines a description of media that they could not otherwise relate to your media. Surely by now you know that Google or any other search engine for that matter cannot see or comprehend what your image is without some kind of description from you the webmaster. So, they (the search engines) actually need you to tell them what an image represents. This is an awesome opportunity for you to influence the position in the search engines.

In the case of a project that we managed for a pet related business, we took the opportunity to label all pictures of the dogs with the name and breed of the dog. We resubmitted the sitemap to all the major search engines as well as created links to the pages as usual. Over the next several weeks we started to see a huge increase in the amount of traffic that we were obtaining for this account. The images were actually bringing in traffic themselves as they had been indexed and those searchers that were looking for images of the dogs that we had described were visiting our customer’s site after they had located the images!

Over the next several weeks, we noticed yet another increase in traffic as other sites were linking to our images and the pages containing the images from their sites. This brought in another wave of traffic. This project realized over 100% increase in organic traffic by simply utilizing alt text and title tags throughout the pages of our customer’s website.

I am not suggesting that alt text on all of the images of your site will increase traffic by 100%. At the end of the day, most of us are not in the pet industry or any industry for that matter where customers are looking for pictures of our product or services regularly. For example, if I labeled everyone of the images on our site with the keywords “Denver SEO“, it is very unlikely that I will obtain that many visitors from the images of my site; however, if I could get one of my images to show up in the organic rankings then perhaps my listing would stick out among all of my competitors as I would be one of the only results that had an image next to my title.

In conclusion, there is absolutely no way that completing alt text could hurt your campaign. Sure it is an additional step while completing your onsite optimization, but the time invested seems like it would be worthwhile considering that it is a small investment. I do want to emphasize that I do not believe that alt text will make or break your search engine optimization campaign, but I do believe it is worthwhile to add this element to your site. Making your site more useful to your users is what we all want to accomplish, so make certain that you are not keyword stuffing the tags and using legitimate short descriptions as this could definitely help your rankings for long tail keywords as well. At the end of the day, if nothing else, alt text will at least make your site more accessible to the search engines and those that access your site with screen readers, etc. If you are working with a seo company you would definitely want to check your images and make sure that they have been optimized with alt text or title tags.

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It is almost impossible to not throw yourself into the design of your new website. When we were designing our brand-new website, we made some of the very same mistakes that we see clients make on an ongoing basis. We included aspects or features to the website that we really liked, and we forgot for a moment that our demographic or audience is business owners and business professionals. For us we are going to have to go back to the drawing board and redesign a completely brand-new website that focuses strictly on professionals, and their pain or needs for Internet marketing versus making it more fun and personal for us. I think it’s very easy to forget who you are designing a website for.

The same goes for search engine optimization, it is so often that we see customers suggest key phrases and keywords that definitely apply to their business; however, “John Q. Public” will probably not use the key phrases and keywords originally selected by the business owner. For example let’s take my industry, I am a professional search engine optimization expert in Denver, and I think that probably one of the most used search terms for customers that are looking for our services would be “Denver SEO“. When we talk with customers about how they found us online, we find that they very rarely come to us using that exact search term. For us the search term Denver SEO makes the most sense as we are in the business, and search engine optimization is most often referred to as “SEO”, so would that make the most sense that companies and marketing professionals in the Denver area would type in “Denver SEO”?

The fact is that most of these companies or individuals that are searching for search engine optimization and Denver do not use the keyword “Denver SEO”. When I look at the analytics for our project, most of the searchers that do come to our website are finding us through the search term “Denver SEO”, yet when I speak with customers that have found our website online and called us they have usually used a different key term or keyword phrase. Perhaps “Denver SEO” is so popular because it is our competitors that use this term, or maybe it is industry professionals that are involved in internet marketing. My point here is that the customers that are calling usually type in something much different like “Denver Interent Marketing Companies“. So although we are getting much traffic from obtaining a first page ranking for the keyword “Denver SEO”, we also have to consider other extrapolations of that keyword such as “Denver Seo company, Denver Seo firm, Denver Seo professional, Denver search engine Optimization Company, search engine optimization Denver, etc.”

The extrapolations or longer keyword phrases are usually much easier to obtain a page-one ranking than a one-word or two word key phrase. Using these variations of search terms in setting up your website will help you to avoid stuffing your pages with the same keywords and give you the ability to produce more content that is actually “useful”. Ultimately at the end of the day you are not producing the website for yourself or for Google, you are producing the website for the end-user. By developing content that is useful and has relevant keywords sprinkled throughout the content piece, you will obtain a lower bounce rate and a higher conversion rate from the website.

The video that I’ve included in this post is a short example of how to use keywords and keyword phrases throughout your blogging campaign that will complement your search engine optimization campaign.

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What good is a marketing tool if you cannot track its effects? A website is not one of those marketing pieces that you use to just create awareness of your companies existence. A website correctly marketed online will bring in leads and direct prospective clients to your business’s location. If not marketed online, it’s more of an electronic business card that people can check out once they know about you. Regardless how you use your website, you need to be able to see how many visitors it is getting and more importantly how they found you, how long they were on your site and what pages they visited. By using the free analytics tool provided by Google, you are able to see these things and much more!

The first thing you should do to make it easy on yourself is sign up for a Google or Gmail account if you do not already have one. By doing this you allow yourself access to all of the great free tools Google has available such as Google Analytics. After signing up and logging into your Gmail account, search for “Google analytics“and locate the tool. Once there, you will find the directions for adding a site to the Analytics tool. An important aspect of using Google Analytics is putting the tracking code on every page of your website. This way it will allow you to get a real indication of which pages your searchers like visiting and what pages they do not visit often. You can then try to either create more exposure to those pages or add more to the page that would attract more traffic.

Once you have added analytics to your website it will immediately start recording your website traffic’s tendencies such as pages visited, time on the site and whether or not the visitor is new to your website or not. Obviously when you first start out, every visitor will be a new one but after a few days your percentage of new visitors will start to drop. A good percentage of new visitors is anywhere above 85%. The idea is to keep driving new traffic to your website but making sure your website is useful enough to bring back those who have already been there.

There are many features of Google Analytics that can benefit your search engine optimization campaign. The Google algorithm used for ranking sites for example includes many of the aspects that analytics will show you including bounce rate, length of time on the site & the referring sites you are getting traffic you get. These are all important things to keep track of to help you with increasing your ranking on Google. You want a low bounce rate or to limit the number of people who leave your site in 30 seconds or less, you want to keep visitors on you site as long as possible and also increase the number of referred traffic coming to your site.

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Search Engine Optimization is much more than just optimizing for the first page of Google. If you have read through our previous posts than you already understand this concept. As a matter of fact when I go to review my monthly analytics a good 26% to 30% of my traffic comes from other sources than the search engines. Granted a good 54.44% of the traffic we obtain comes from search engines but I definitely would not want to give up 26%! In order to get the referral traffic we are exposed through various social networks online as well as several different social bookmarking sites. The whole goal of Guerrilla SEO or Guerilla search engine marketing is to bring traffic to your site without blaring a direct commercial for your services or product.

A good example of Guerilla SEO tactics would be marketing through article marketing to the major article repositories like Ezine Articles. By obtaining an “Expert Author” status you are allowing Ezine Articles to publish your content which in turn allows other users to use your content as long as they post the article “as is” with the links in the resources box. Those links of course (you are usually allowed to links within the resource box) are directed to your website or URL. By establishing yourself as an Expert Author you are accomplishing two things. First you are establishing yourself as a credible source for your service or product and secondly you are not directly selling your services. In this “shared planet” paradigm it is almost forbidden to come right out and ask for business. So by giving you information away without any expectation of reciprocity you are showing your dedication to your profession and opinion on the matter that you are writing about. A good example of this would be an article that I most recently published on SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking. This article has generated a fair amount of hits already (100 views in the last 60 days). I know that is not groundbreaking; however, if I have 20 of these articles generating the same amount of interest as this article than the math is pretty easy, I would be looking at 2,000 views on my articles every month! The conversion of that traffic is at about 2% meaning that I am getting almost 2% of the viewers of this article clicking through to my site, so that is an additional 40 visitors that I am obtaining. If you search for “SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking” you will see that my article is at the top of the rankings for this search term. There are not enough searches for this search term to obtain any kind of data from Google, at the same time obtaining that number one page rank for the search term took little or no effort at all. This is a small added bonus for the article; most of the traffic definitely comes through the article repositories.

Review your competitors “SEO Strategy“, you are usually able to determine which of the links your competition has working for them. You can find your competitors highest page rank link by simply visiting www.seochat.com and going to their “PageRank Search” Page. Once you are on the page rank search page simply type in your competitor’s site www.yourcompetitor.com, select to sort the results by page rank and change the results to show 100 listings per page. Now you have a list of links that your competitor shows up on in order of importance. From here all you need do is copy your competition’s actions on these pages. You can post on a comment section, offer a link exchange or even work on a strategic alliance with some of the webmasters from these pages. The possibilities are sincerely unlimited.

If we use our site as an example, for the keyword “Denver SEO” today’s top player is a site www.denver seo.net, who has most recently obtained a #1 listing in Google for the search term. I can see the various directories that this site has been submitted to and start listing my site for the anchor text “Denver SEO” just as my competitor has done. By doing this and then adding more links to my site I will be able to create more popularity for my domain and get ahead in the rankings!

So what are you waiting for, find out your competitors blueprint to SEO now!

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Optimizing yoru Google Profile could prove to be easier than any other "Social Networking" site

By: Cade Lee

Your Google Profile never really had any use until now. When I say that what I mean is that there has never really been any practical use for it. I guess most of us used the profile to update our photos for Google Talk but that was definitely the extent of it until this week. Around October of last year, Google started indexing profiles by allowing their robots to start crawling through the profiles. Since then not much has happened until the past few weeks. I have started to see these profiles show at the bottom of the pages when I search for various names.

The minute that I started seeing the different profiles show at the bottom of the search engines, I had to log into my Google account and figure out the process for getting my profile on the 1^st page of Google. Now, it’s important to note that profile shows at the bottom of the 1^st page of Google, but the first page is the first page to me. So, anyway to start with your Google profile start here. Once you have landed on Google’s profile page, if you are already logged into your Google account you will automatically be brought to the profile page that you will need to complete. If you are not logged in you will be asked to login and then you will be brought to the profile page. As with any directory submission or social networking profile, it’s important to fill out as much of the profile as possible. I have found that the “Bio” section of any profile is one of the best places that you can place some of the keywords that are important for your profession or business. So as with any content you will want to make certain to place your keywords within the bio here. In my bio or “about me” section I was able to utilize anchor text and back link to those sites that I have been optimizing for my own personal SEO campaigns.

Another key feature to Google’s profile is it allows you to input related URL’s for your profile along with Anchor Text or “Link Name”. I was able to put my linked in page, Facebook page, Twitter profile as well as my blog and website and there was still room for my URL’s if I wanted. As a side note, all the links created through the Google Profile are “dofollow” links which I have never really cared about. I have always figured a link is a link even if the bots cannot follow it. I wasn’t expecting the profile to be as SEO friendly as it is. You can view my profile here.

After completing the profile I searched my name immediately and seriously, seconds after completing my profile, I was placed on the first page of Google for the search term, “Cade Lee Denver” and “Cade Lee “. Granted my name is a little different than John Smith, but you will notice under the search “Cade Lee” there is a martial arts expert (or something like that) with my same name. So there is someone else in the world with the name Cade Lee after all.

After seeing such quick results I wondered, “What would happen if a company opened a Gmail account using appropriate keywords in the e-mail address, and then worked the profile for ranking?” So I did it. I opened a Google account for denver-seo-firm@gmail.com. I completed the profile as previously described, and no, it did not make it to the first page immediately (in the profile section) for the search term “Denver SEO Firm“. I am proud to say that within the first 7 days of completing the profile, the profile has made the first 100 with no other efforts made. I believe the first profile made the 1^st page immediately because it was an older account and Google had probably already indexed the profile.

I will be following up on this article in the near future as the next step is going to be building backlinks to these profiles and watching the effect of this in the rankings, I will be using the denver-seo-firm@gmail.com profile to see if we can obtain rankings for “Denver SEO” (very competitive search term in our local market). I will amend this post with what I find!

Lastly, Google does have a verification process for your profile as discussed by Chris Crum of Webpronews.com on April 23, 2009. For more information on getting your Google Profile Verified, read more here. Note that I have not gone through the verfication process with any of the profiles mentioned above.

Cade Lee is a search engine optimization professional in Denver, Colorado. He is a SEO/ SEM coach and speaker specializing in optimization for local and long tail keywords.

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SEO Tips For You

These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily

Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time. I make this clarification because you must understand search

engines, especially Google, are constantly redefining how they rank pages. Here are my favorite SEO tips, tactics and strategies:

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches.

Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don’t forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.

3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it – keeping

a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords… are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be

keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site – make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name

also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.

4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don’t ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google’s influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my

niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.

5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the ‘anchor text’ is related to your keywords but don’t ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don’t forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant

sites in your niche.

6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing short 500 – 700 word informative and helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters… plus other major online sites. Don’t forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you’re also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don’t forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages… to increase your rankings and traffic.

7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts – a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts.  Works similar as a sub-domain

but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you’re creating content to first satisfy your visitors.

8. WordPress Blog Software is extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.

9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter… media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati… you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It’s time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a

WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on

all my content.

10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don’t want SEO – you want effective SEO. In order

to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.

First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you’re pursuing – your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That’s why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what’s been searched for or discussed.

Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived

authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site – tops in your niche – the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.

Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you’re into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.

Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you’re seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.

…

The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools If you liked the SEO tips above, why not try the Free 7 Day Traffic course here: Internet Marketing Course Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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