Monday, June 25, 2007

Search Engine Optimization and Link Building

Link Building and SEO

Link Building is actually not a search engine optimization process but instead is a form or method of advertising which involves techniques, tactics and ways to get other websites to link to yours. It is a method wherein you use search engine optimization in order to achieve high rankings in the search engines in a shorter time frame. Link building also helps your websites to get the search engine trust which is responsible for giving importance to your webpages and therefore achieve positive results through SEO of your advertising method called link building.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process by which a webmaster applies SEO techniques dedicated to improving the rankings, quality of a website and the volume of traffic to any website that comes with the resulting efforts of optimization. These traffic comes from search engines through their organic search results which is the primary target in using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and methods.Traffic from search engines through search engine optimization will increase in basis of a simple fact, "the earlier a site is presented to the search engines by making them available in the search results, the higher it will rank and the more searchers will visit the site". Although SEO is often believed to target the the top of the search engine results, webmasters can also target other kinds of search such as image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines through search engine optimization.

SEO as A Marketing Strategy

If search engine optimization has a true purpose which is for increasing a site's relevancy, SEO also has a main point of consideration which is how search engine and search engine result algorithms work for a website or a webpage and what sort of major keywords or key phrases do most people search for. This way, the optimization of a webpage in terms of content should be based on the mentioned factors which is done through careful observation of the applied search engine optimization efforts. On the other hand, SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, content, presentation, structure, aesthetics, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs and software from completely crawling a website or webpage in any circumstance. Other preferred important efforts may comprise having juicy and unique content to a website page and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engines with the use of containing optimized keywords that most humans would take his browser to by interest and search for information.

The SEO Acronym

SEO as an acronym refers to search engine optimizers, which is of course the person counterpart who gets the search engine optimization job done. SEO is actually a term that was developed through time and became adopted by an industry, composed of consultants who carries out optimization projects for clients who want to get his share of the top of the search engine results pages (SERP). Although there are existing in-house SEO employees today, most would prefer to go freelance and take care of their own websites and just take out any job available through outsourcing for some extra bucks to be used in maintaining their own websites. These types of search engine optimizers are the ones who offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Since the nature of an effective SEO is to know the ways to manipulate content and SEO also require making some necessary changes to the HTML source code of a site, it is therefore a big advantage for search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to use and incorporate into web site development and design. A term that best describe's the resultant product which is an optimized webpage after applying search engine optimization is dubbed as search engine-friendly.

5 Important Steps for SEO and Link Building

1. Set Your Link Building Goal- Link building will surely take a lot of your precious time if you don't learn to manage your goals first. On the other hand, it would be very effective and easy to accomplish a goal if you have plans already set up for it and the will to want to keep on track at all times. Set first a goal by the number. This means that you determine the number of links you want to achieve at a certain time frame. This will serve as a way to stay motivated and strive harder to meet your own demands through the process of link building for your websites.

Remember that all link building efforts will always depend on the sites you are asking to get links from and the approach that you offer the webmaster of the site. This will be the major factor for getting the needed results. As a general rule of thumb, "try to set your link building goal at a maximum of four-to-six times higher than the target links that you want to receive". This means that if you want to get 100 links, then you need to set your goal at about 400 to 600 links. The reason for this big adjustment is the fact that based on actual experience, chances are, most sites will not want to trade links with yours for various reasons.

2. Make Sure Your Site Is Worth a Link - This specific goal actually plays a very big part in search engine optimization, particularly, content management. This means that "your site must offer something of value in return for their link and also to encourage other webmasters of a website to give you a link because they see your content as a relevant factor for their own purpose in the future". That their trust in your site would also give them an advantage in the point of view of the search engines".

If your site is in to selling products instead of services and information, then you might just need to get busy creating some juicy content as a linkbait. Some good examples of contents that are viable for linkbaiting include tutorials, guides, historical descriptions, how-to articles, product reviews, tools, tips or even software and so on. On product selling sites, creating content can be a tough job, but it is sure ball if you just follow the tips i gave above to encourage others to link to your site.

If you are not comfortable with research, then just try to make your workload easy on yourself by providing content or topics that you know have interesting relevance to your site. If you see yourself not having the qualities of a writer, remember that you can always add some freebies like tools, software and other free downloads to entice your target link partners. The best part of creating linkable content is that if you do it well enough, you will find that people will link to your site without you even asking, and as far as i know, that's the easiest way to build links. Lastly, have a links page and be sure to make them really presentable where your target link partners can see their websites listed at, just in case. Many directories have actually followed this strategy today and found it very effective.

3. Know the Types of Sites You Want to Link With - This time, take a little of your time to think about some thoughts and gather your detailed research assuming that you already have one because you will need to figure out and sort out all of the types of sites that you see could potentially trade links with you and give you that page importance marked by search engines. You must make sure that you are focusing on sites that are related to your target market. Unrelated websites will only make your traded links look bogus in the point of view of the search engines and their army of crawlers, spiders and bots.

4. Gather Tools and Evaluate Link Partners - To maximize every effort that you exert for link building on your site, be sure to not spend so much time trying to have links from sites that the search engines don't think are valuable nor has any common relation to your pages, content or site category. A good tool to use in knowing the importance of a website is by the use of the Google Toolbar or its Page Rank Bar (PR Bar). This PR bar integrates with your Web browser to provide you the "page rank" of each site you visit. Although it is just a simple estimate by Google of a website's relevance in the search engine results pages (SERP), nevertheless, it could be the best guide for you to start evaluating your link partners. The higher a page rank given to a website by Google, the more you can be sure that it is a good site to link with. "The higher the page rank of a website, the better it is to link with it". A good observable strategy in link building is to try to link up with sites that have high PR than yours in order to gain advantage in the results as fast as you expect.

5. Setting Your Link Building Schedules - In every target project, there must be a schedule of things to do as well as things to expect afterwards. It will be a sure thing that you'll find it easy building links for your website if you get yourself in a situation where all your link-building efforts are put in an excel sheet or anywhere you feel comfortable in the form of a chronologically-arranged schedule. Consider at first doing a 45 to 60-minute of link building through directory submission each day as based on my own experience to avoid the repetitive task boredom and then get to evaluate your efforts . This step will surely prevent burnout, which is inevitable if you try to do your entire campaign in a couple of days for 8 long hours or more of your daily time.

Remember that it is not always true that subjecting yourself to too much of a repetitive task will produce good results. It will sometimes stress you out and later on change your moods and lead to a mismanaged schedule failing to do things at the right time and not coming up with the desired markup target to meet your demands and get on top of the search engines at the shortest time possible.

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