Google Loves Authority“We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea, that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important. “~ Sergey Brin, Co-Founder, Google
Real Estate SEO – BloggingA blog gives you a great chance to display your expertise on your topic. As a real estate agent people looking for a home in your community expect you to be an expert on the community. They expect you to be an expert on real estate and you may even have some additional and related expertise that you want o display as a way to differentiate yourself and your company.
A blog is one of the best ways to demonstrate your expertise. This is valuable for you and your business.
Mixed Phrase and Natural LinkingIn the past few months we have been asked over and over again what to do about the Google Penguin algorithm. We have a simple answer; when it comes to backlinks the linking profile needs to be natural.
Blogging and TeachingA great attitude to have when you blog is to teach. This attitude helps in many ways. First, if you have this attitude then you have an attitude where you want to help and add value. This is important for our society and for our community.
It is also important to learn something well enough to teach it. To learn something to be able to teach it means that you have done your homework and have given your subject some thought. You have considered how to explain it to others and have thought out how to make your materials interesting and engaging. A good teacher is an interesting and engaging teacher. Blogging and teaching are a perfect combination!
Writing blog posts and articles helps to organize your thoughts and review the knowledge you’ve already acquired. Also, it usually requires some research and examples, which can even lead to knowing the topic deeper and better.
If you dedicate yourself to teaching others about your topic you are making a larger contribution than otherwise. This is a clear benefit to your audience. If you can add valuable benefits to your audience then you keep them coming back for more and this not only helps you to maintain your readership but also helps you to increase your readership.
Last of all, your value added teaching content will enable you to gain in-coming links to your materials and this will help you to gain search position in two ways – one the content will gain search position in and of itself and will gain search position by attracting in-coming links. Off-site optimization (gaining back links) is an essential part of gaining search position. Read more about on-site and off-site search engine optimization here.
Backlinks and Web ContentThere are many different ways you can get more links pointing to the pages on your website.
First off, think about when you last shared a web page with someone else. You shared because you thought that it was:
Click on any of the above links to see an example. Each of these links to the source is valuable in some manner in my opinion.
The page that you shared was well done. It had something to offer.
Therefore, a great the 1st step to getting some great backlinks is to create some excellent content that people will value.
Create web content worth linking to and the backlinks will come without you having to beg for them.
Link Network – Consider Your Internal Link NetworkYou need to help your search engine ranking cause by developing the link network of your pages.
You can control a certain part of your page’s link network as you can control the internal (within your own site) linking.
For example, do you have some links from your home page going to deeper internal pages as part of your link network made with some important keyword text? If you don’t then you should.
Here are three key internal link building activities to help your pages gain page rank and search position:
If you create an internal link network you will help to let Page Rank flow freely throughout your site. If you have an internal blog then don’t add nofollow on your links to your category or your archive pages allow these pages to be found and to enjoy an increase in page rank as well.
There are some pages where you may want to add the nofollow attribute. For example you do not need to show the search engines your subscriber login page as a search engine spider is not going to log into your site. You also do not need to have them detect your RSS feed page as the search engines do not want to display RSS feed pages in their search results. There may be other links that you do not want the search engine spiders to follow – think out and plan out your internal links well.
As a final comment you should always give some good thought to which external pages you link to. I know many people that feel that they do not want to make external links because it will bleed page rank. While this may be true consider that Google respects and encourages you to make links off your site to content that it has high regard for. The major search engines view this as positive as you are adding value for your visitors. Therefore, you can still gain some credit from Google for linking to other high page rank pages.
Top Ten Linking Questions When Google introduced the Penguin algorithm into the search engine position ranking mix it caused quite a concern in the search engine positioning industry. It also caused some websites to drop in position.
We have been fielding many questions about what constitutes a good link which passes the “good link” test when analyzed by Penguin.
Does your website get a passing grade?
What is Link Velocity?This is the speed at which you acquire links to your website. This is important as you always want to acquire links in what appears to be a natural way.
I have seen small websites that have acquired 200 links in a single day. I have even seen a small local business site gain 200 links on New Years Day. I have a hard time thinking about how a small local website could get 200 link in a single day and on New Years Day as well.
Another factor associated with the natural look of link velocity is that if a website has gained 20 links over a 6-month period and then over a 3-day period gains 100 links then this may raise a red flag at Google. The Link Velocity associated with the 3-day time frame does not look natural for that specific website. There may be many sites that gain 100 links over a 3-day time frame but this is not natural for this particular website based on their history of link acquisition.
Link Velocity can also look fishy when there is very little new content being produced. A website that creates fresh content and then also has a link velocity profile that meshes with the content creation profile has two component that mesh and that look natural. Th link acquisition and the fresh content coincide. This looks natural.
What looks natural is based on the specifics of the website. Items such as age of website, historical rate of link generation, content creation rate versus link velocity all mesh together.
Another factor could be the type of links that a website has historically acquired versus a new type of link. For example if for 2 years it can be seen that links have come from blogs and the total is 250 links (essentially all from blogs) and then for two months you gain 100 additional links but none of these links come from a blog then this may raise a flag.
Link Building has to be an essential part of your SEO Strategy and we can help devise a SEO and Link Building Strategy.
SEO –Link BuildingOne reason you should deep link is that it enhances the users experience. Sending a user to a deep page will probably better relate to his or her goals than having an inbound links go only to your home page.
Also, remember that it is not possible for your home page to rank for every single keyword you want to be 0ptimized for.
Let’s look at three great reasons to acquire deep links – authority, relevancy and visibility. How is deep linking related to these important marketing factors?
Deep linking raises the authority of your entire site. If all you did was optimize and send traffic to your home page then you might have a home page with a high authority rank but the other pages on your site would have little or no authority. When search engines looked at your site then those low-authority pages lower the authority of your home page. Deep linking can help you increase your entire site’s authority.
Because you can’t optimize your home page for every single important keyword you must use internal pages. When the pages you publish contain those keywords in the meta data (URL, title tag, image attribute, etc.) and the body copy, then when search engines crawl you’re your will gain higher marks and therefore position for that keyword phrase. Because the keyword is relevant to the page and you have links made with keyword-rich anchor text from another page, the search engines consider it an authority page and rank it higher.
Large sites suffer from too many pages not getting indexed because of their sheer size. This is where good SEO skills such as deep linking come into play. These deep links which can come from your own site as well as other sites help search engines follow the path through your site to your “deep” pages. It makes these pages more visible. Visibility is a vital factor when it comes to search engine marketing.
Watch for future posts on how to acquire deep links.
What is a Fishy Link?Penguin is a new version of the Google algorithm. It is intended to sniff out and then trash “fishy” links. This begs an important question. How does Google define a fishy link? How will Penguin catch these smelly fishy links?
I want to help you to understand what is the thinking behind a fishy link.
Here are some concepts:
Beyond this Penguin wants to see links built up over time. If it detects a large number over a fairly short time frame then it may pay closer attention and if you violate a few of the above items then with the extra scrutiny your search position may not improve.