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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Writing Internet Articles

Written by: Nick Hantge

Do you consider yourself a talented writer, but you’re not sure how to go about it?  If you enjoy writing and you want to be able to make money off your skill, consider writing articles to help with other’s internet marketing campaigns.  There is probably an SEO company in your area who would be willing to pay for niche related articles.  Article writing is a great skill to develop and market yourself. Writing is in high demand so take advantage of your writing skills and make some extra cash. Well-written articles on any topic are always in high demand. 

Get to the Point

Internet articles are written slightly differently to the conventional articles you read in the daily newspapers or magazines. Your style should be simple. The contents of the article should be pitched in a brief but informative manner to hold the person’s interest. Internet searchers are impatient and want to find information quickly as possible.  This being said, keep your articles quick and to the point.  Often times online articles are written with numbers or bullet points to guide readers through quickly.

Catchy Article Titles

Think about what will grab the attention of your audience, start with an attractive title.  It will be the first chance you have to gain interest of searchers to your article and also help you begin your introduction.  Writing a catchy title will separate your article from the others around it.  A nice title may be the key to attracting searchers to your articles and getting them to click on your links driving more traffic to your site which is obviously the main point of any internet marketing campaign.

The introduction of your article should summarize the focal point of what you’re going to write about.  This will draw your reader in and they’ll want to continue reading.  Start with the main point of your artilce and defend it or describe it in the rest of your article. If the reader finds your point interesting they will read the rest of your article and hopefully click on the links to the website you are promoting.  When it comes to writing, remember that ‘less is more’.  Don’t make your articles too long.  Most internet articles vary between 300-500 words. 

Avoid getting technical. Don’t get wrapped up in impressing your reader. They care more about your points and topics, not your vocabulary.  Your intention is to share information in a friendly, efficient manner. The ideal internet article should be clearly communicated, easily understood, and looked at as a resource. Remember if further information is required, the person will pursue the matter by themselves.

All internet articles should be submitted in Word. Once you’re finished writing, make sure you proofread the article and put it through a grammar and spelling check.  Did you communicate your ideas clearly? Are you happy with the end result?  If so, you are going to want to start finding places to submit your articles or sites that buy articles.  Often times you can contact a local SEO company near you and ask them what types of articles they could use.  Work out a deal with an internet marketing firm and start making money with your writing skills.

Finally, don’t be disheartened if your first article is not accepted. Stick with it, and success will soon come your way. You will be sure to find a SEO company who is willing to buy articles for their clients.

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While you are waiting for results, here are some basic SEO tips that you can follow which should help you cut down your time waiting.

Make certain to select a keyword theme for each page of your website.

Many sites that we have evaluated and reviewed do not have enough diversity within the pages or the subordinate pages to obtain the wide range of keywords that they would like to achieve. So identify a group of keywords for every page that you publish, a group of keywords that fit well into your SEO plan.

If the website you are building and promoting does not have enough content to tip the scales of the search engines to your favor as “The Resource” for the keywords you are approaching, or if your site does not contain enough significant or important internal links, how will you possibly be able to surpass your competitors that are using large amounts of content and links?

So, plan each page with plenty of content and key words with internal links throughout your website. Make certain that you do not stuff your site with too many keywords as you will want to make the site readable and interesting for your human visitors as well.

Identify the keyword theme to each page using the Meta tag keywords. Since Google and some of the other major search engines do not utilize the keyword Meta tag, we have made it useful by indentifying the “keyword theme” to each of our pages.

Internal links from pages and to other pages using the keyword that you want the target page to rank for.

This is probably one of the most difficult aspects of search engine optimization to keep track of. For our projects we have literally drawn out a diagram or flow chart of the pages within the site that we are marketing and labeled each with the keyword theme for each page. Once we have identified the pages and the keyword themes for each page, it is much easier to take the keyword phrases throughout your website and link those phrases to the page that matches that theme.

This tactic is very similar to that of Wikipedia. You are simply identifying the “resource page” for the designated keyword by consistently using keyword-rich anchor text throughout your website.  By doing this you will also be able to achieve double indexing in some cases for your website.

We believe that this step for onsite optimization is critical to outperforming your online competition. If you are working with a SEO company, than it is imperative that you bring this approach to their attention and that they explain to you their internal linking strategy.

Optimize the page for many variations of the keyword that you are targeting.

If you are going to optimize a page for a certain keyword, you might as well go for as many variations or extrapolations of that keyword that you can. So, using an example here, let’s go with the keyword “SEO Company”. Variations that you might want to use would be, “SEO Company’s”, “SEO Companies”, “Internet Marketing Company”, “Internet Marketing Companies” and “Search Engine Optimization Company”. You can see from the example that I have used, I have pluralized the keyword, misspelled the keyword and even brought in a synonymous keyword phrase.

By following these three steps you should be able to really shore up your website so that as Google or any other indexing robots devour your website, you will obtain an advantage over your online competitors that have not followed these same simple techniques. Any worthwhile SEO campaign takes a great amount of time and dedication, so as you are working on link building strategies and submitting your site to different directories, make certain to work these strategies and you will start to see a major difference in the way your site is ranked in the search engines.

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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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Choosing an effective and reliable SEO company can be quite difficult, especially with the rise of its popularity and the vast amount of businesses offering SEO services in the past 2 years.  Search Engine Optimization is one of the biggest investments you will make into establishing your companies online presence which makes it even more imperative you make the right choice when hiring an SEO company.  It goes without saying that hiring the wrong SEO consultant will not only cost you a lot of money but it could also cost you your domain getting dropped or delisted by Google if the company breaks the rules and uses black hat tactics.

Here are some questions to ask to help you make the important decision of hiring the best SEO company for your company, business or website.  Each SEO company has something special to offer so finding the right fit will help ensure a successful and pleasant SEO campaign.

How long have they been established? Along with most things in life, the longer you have been doing something; normally the better you are at it.  When you try to market a website in the top search engines, you have to be able to adapt to the changes they are making in their algorithm and how they rank sites.  If a company has been doing SEO for more than a few years they have had to deal with the changes made and should be able to show you how they’ve adapted.

If possible, take into account how long the SEO company has been established, the chances are if its been around for a few years they will be well up to date with the latest strategies and have a decent history and background.

Can they provide testimonials & recommendations? Any good company, regardless of the industry, should be able to provide a handful of testimonials and recommendations from their previous projects.  Now remember they are going to give you their favorite customers if not friend’s phone numbers so it is important to ask these questions:

“How long did it take to see results on the search engines for your campaign”?  This will give you a good indication of how the time and effort the company operates at.  A good SEO company should be able to show results inside of the first 30 days.  They will not be dramatic results but any SEO consultant will tell you they have the ability to influence a websites ranking in a months time.

“Why did you hire this SEO company”?  Asking this will let you know if they hired because of a previous relationship, price or even their internet marketing strategies.

“Did they do more for you other than just get you to the top of SERPS?  A good SEO company will do more than just get you to the top of Google for “Denver Attorney”.  If the company knows anything about internet marketing they understand that today’s searchers are researching companies and individuals before they make decisions.  An SEO company should be working on video and article optimization to help build credibility for your company as well.

Do they make any “too good to be true” claims? Any SEO company that makes a guarantee is simply not worth working with.  As an SEO consultant, I personally know I cannot guarantee anything because I do not have direct control of a websites ranking.  Just like a weatherman gives an educated guess about the 7 day forecast, an SEO consultant will give you an educated guess as to where they can get you placed on the search engines.  The only guarantee most of us can offer is to work hard and within the rules.

“Do they enjoy your line of business”? This might seem like a silly question to ask but it actually can be a good indication whether the SEO company is right for you.  As an SEO consultant, I can say from tons of experience it is everything in the world to be passionate about an SEO campaign we are working on.  The amount of time and energy put into a campaign is enough to drive you crazy if you do not like talking or writing about a particular industry.  Make sure to find someone who is at least interested in the services you provide or products you offer, it might help make the SEO campaign be more effective.

Although these are just a few questions to ask, it should help give you an idea if the SEO company is a good fit for you and your business.  If you have any other questions about hiring an SEO company, please don’t hesitate to email me at nick@thisisiniquitous.com or give me a call (303) 999-7963.  I would be happy to answer any questions you have.

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