10 Key SEO Strategies That Improve Search Engine Rankings

June 15, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Link Building 

Everyone has the same goal with their website or blog, and that’s of course better search engine rankings. The problem is that not everyone knows how to go about getting this done, and even the people who do think they know often don’t. There is a great deal of conflicting information out there and blackhat strategies that could end up creating more issues for your site than anything else.

The first is what most people already know, and that’s on-page SEO tactics. These include things like keyword inclusion and internal linking. The other half of SEO however may actually be even more important for your Google rankings. This is off-page SEO, and it incorporates all of the work that you do to help improve your search engine standings on other websites and through other sources and mediums throughout the web.

Offsite SEO however is extremely important and therefore you must become familiar with how you can succeed. Higher Google rankings will be waiting for you when you make use of these top 10 offsite SEO strategies, ideas and tactics.

1. Backlinks – The long story short is that the more backlinks you have leading to your website the better your website ill be able to rank. This is one of the most important elements of improving your Google rankings with off page SEO.

2. Backlink Quality – While the more backlinks you have for your website the better, the quality of the backlinks you have also plays a role. Not all links are created equally, and ones that have more inherent value will provide a larger boost to your Google rankings. High quality links are from related sites, are one-way links meaning you don’t have to link back and are from high ranking sites.

3. Backlink Diversity – In addition to the quantity and quality of backlinks you have leading to your website, the diversity of backlinks you have also plays a role. It will help your rankings much more to have links coming in from numerous sources including blogs, directories, forums, articles, related websites and more than to just have links coming in from one individual class.

4. Backlink Anchor Text – Having a backlink is great, but having a backlink that includes highly targeted anchor text is even better. The anchor text used in a link leading to one of your web pages will help associate that page with the included term. This mans that it’s a great way to improve your Google rankings for your targeted keywords and key phrases.

5. Age of Domain – The older your domain, or the longer your website has been around, the more highly credible it will be viewed. Therefore having a long established web presence or purchasing an older domain in good standing is a strong and quick way to boost your Google rankings.

6. Web 2.0: You can refer to web 2.0 as many different things, social media, social networking, community building or anything else. The value of web 2.0 lies in your ability to generate backlinks, reach out to more prospects and customers and increase your presence in a wide range of different mediums.

7. Visitor Trends: The way that visitors behave with your site is also extremely important for your Google rankings. For example if you apply some solid SEO tactics and gain more traffic, but all of your visits result in bounces, then clearly people aren’t finding what they are looking for from your website and you can end up being penalized. You are looking to achieve as low a bounce rate as possible, showing that you are a valued and related website.

8. Traffic Supply: You can get your traffic from any different sources on the Internet. Unfortunately, some of them are frowned upon, and can actually give your website a poor reputation that hinders your Google rankings. Instead of participating in any blackhat schemes, get your traffic naturally from organic SEO and PPC.

9. Previous History: The previous history of your website and the trends of popularity will factor into your long term Google rankings. What this means is that if your site suddenly spikes in traffic for some reason, or suddenly quadruples its content or shows up with 2,000 more incoming links, it will be looked at as suspicious at first. More successful is the gradual increase of content, and incoming links.

10. Web Directories – Web directories are not as valuable as they once were for your Google rankings but inclusion in the top directories can still provide a solid boost. Don’t worry about being listed in hundreds or thousands of directories with little to no value and instead focus on getting included in just a handful of the top ones.

These are just a summation of some of the important off-page SEO tactics that you can use to help improve your Google rankings. These days you need far more than just optimized content in order to gain a foothold in the search engines. Many people view off-page SEO as the equal to on-page SEO, and many other people view link building and other off-page SEO tactics as even more important.

Therefore as a small business owner or webmaster, it’s extremely important to your long term viability and success that you work with these SEO strategies. They will boost your credibility, reputation and online presence and as a result, your Google rankings and total Internet success will increase as well.

Learn more about SEO. Stop by Jim Collin’s site www.SmartMediaInnovations.com today and find the best SEO Services, tips and information.

7 Key Tips To Get More One-Way Backlinks

November 7, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Backlinks SEO 

Anyone who owns a website should be familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Effective SEO ranks your website high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of the major search engines including Google and Yahoo. One tool that helps get your website high rankings is backlinks. A backlink is a link going from someone else’s website to your website. These are most effective when they are one-way backlinks-meaning it is not a link swap, but rather, another site is linking to yours for a legitimate reason, even though you do not have a link going from your site to their site in return.

While there are services that will sell your links, and sites that allow you to swap large numbers of links with other users, these can be seriously detrimental to your search engine rankings. Major search engines are aware of this practice, and when they’re able to ferret it out, they penalize sites for doing it. It’s far better to get a dozen one way backlinks over the course of a month than to purchase 1,000 paid links or make a quick 100 link trade. Fortunately there are many things you can do to organically develop backlinks to your site that will boost your search engine rankings significantly. Here are seven great ways to get high quality one way backlinks to your website.

1. Article Marketing. Suppose you have a website that sells leather cleaning and conditioning products. You want your site to be nice looking and easy to navigate, with a memorable domain name. How do you get traffic on your site without having a big advertising budget? One way is through article marketing. There are a number of article sites that people use every day to learn about topics that interest them or to learn how to accomplish certain tasks.

Sites like eHow.com, goarticles.com, and ezinearticles.com are where millions of people go when they need to learn something. If you were to write an article about how to care for leather boots and handbags for one of these sites, you would have at the bottom of your article a “resource box” in which you tell a little about yourself and include links to your commercial website. Some of these sites allow links to your site embedded in the articles themselves, and these will also help drive traffic to your site, increasing the probability that you’ll get backlinks.

2. Video Marketing. If you’re using video marketing, you want the maximum number of people to watch your video. There are many ways to promote your video content and encourage backlinks to it. If you have an email newsletter, that’s a great way to get a link to your video content to a lot of people. Some forums and blogs allow links as long as they are not obvious spam posts, and some even allow you to provide a link to your website in your forum “signature.” Read the FAQs on any forum you consider joining before posting links to your site.

You can also tell lots and lots of people about your new videos by announcing it on Twitter. This is a brief (140 character maximum) blurb announcement service many people love. It’s short, sweet, and easy-and this could generate lots of video viewers and one-way backlinks for your site if you can get a buzz started about your videos.

3. Utilize Social Bookmarking Sites. Utilizing social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg.com, and stumbleupon.com, you can also generate some good backlinks. Whenever you submit a link back to your website on these services, visitors will see your link when they are looking for information and may opt to visit your site. They can also go to your videos and give you a positive mark for being a quality website with quality content. The more feedback you get, the more viewed your video will be and the better the backlinks you will generate.

4. Squidoo Lens. Squidoo is a site that is a little like the articles sites mentioned above, but it’s different in some ways. For example, rather than articles, Squidoo publishes what it calls “lenses.” The idea is that you’re an expert on something – everyone is – and that by using text, photos, and video, you can use your lens to focus on information and share it with a huge readership. You can write a lens about your business. Then perhaps you can write more lenses about individual items you sell. You can link all these lenses together to maximize the traffic you drive to your site and encourage backlinks.

5. Hubpages. Hubpages is similar to Squidoo in that you use it to make content-rich pages with text, videos, pictures, and links. You create an account, pick a title for your Hubpage, and add tags. Then you add content: photos, text, products, or comments. While you don’t “own” a topic on Hubpages, the more Hubpages you create, the higher your Hubpages ranking will be, and the more you’ll be seen as the expert on a given topic.

6. Directory Submission. Directory submission is an adjunct to search engine submission. Instead of just submitting your website to search engines, you should submit it to search engines and directories. Directory submission is different because editors review submissions for quality before accepting it into the directory. These editors have so many sites submitted to them that they can be selective about them. The main thing you should keep in mind when submitting your site to a directory is to follow that directory’s instructions exactly. If you don’t, you’re automatically out of the running, even if your site is brilliant. You must also submit it to the proper category and subcategory if applicable. Next to following submission instructions, this is the most important thing to remember with directory submissions.

7. Social Media Sites. These are the sites you always hear about, like Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, and MySpace. These sites allow the sharing of content as well as socializing. If your website or business doesn’t have a Facebook page, it should. Same thing with MySpace. But it is important to know that you need to keep your content on these social media sites up-to-date. A stale MySpace or Facebook page will rapidly disappear from the collective memory. If someone is a “fan” of your Facebook page, they’ll be notified when your page is updated. It is also important to know that even though some of these sites are especially popular among college students and even high school students, your business’s page should retain a degree of decorum. In other words, your page should be made for grown-ups.

If you follow these seven how-to’s, you’ll soon have lots of one-way backlinks enticing visitors to come and view your website. And these backlinks will also help improve your rankings in the search engines. So why not get started today? It’s easy to do!

To improve your SEO, visit Jim Collins’s website www.SmartMediaInnovations.com and attract higher quality Leads and Sales today.

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