Battle 3. Heavy SEO Weapon: Links
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken
(c)"Fight Club"
(c)"Fight Club"
Many times I've heard people whimpering that SEO techniques don't help any more. "I've spent about three hours bolding my keywords, but I'm still not in top 1000!" they say.
The problem is that they are just trying to do what they did many years ago hoping that this could bring the same results...
Stuff and nonsense!
Years ago it was much simpler to be liked by search engines, more or less you had to know how a webpage had to be built, and how to optimize it for your keywords, placing the keywords in the title, in the meta tags and in the body of the page. Then you put some links to some of the big websites and you were done! Even a link exchange page was an optional.
This was the old way to make SEO. Search engine optimization wasn't yet popular as a SEO acronym and the search engines had not yet moved most of the importance from the on-page to the off-page criteria.
As soon as Google introduced link analysis, the death of on-page criteria was imminent. By analyzing external links that point back to your web site, Google assumes that the more of these inbound links your site has, the more relevant your site is compared to a site that has few or no inbound links. It's like an online vote of confidence.
Today off-page factors rule in the Google algorithm, and you simply cannot achieve top rankings for your keywords if you don't work a lot on the off-page optimization of your site.
Remember, it is off-page optimization that really makes a difference in your website's ranking.
So, what are off-page optimization factors anyway? Google now takes into consideration factors like these ones:
And these SEO factors are extremely relevant in determining the ranking of your website.
So, "off-page optimization" means you have to work on building links to your website. To keep it as simple as possible you need to get many links to your site trying to have them from sites with a high page rank and related content.
Here are some things you should pay attention to when building links:
Anchor text is the actual text used within an <a> tag:
<a href="http://www.somesite.com">Anchor Text Goes Here</a>
This is extremely important to use the right anchor text, with the most important keywords for your site there, as it is one of the largest factors taken into account by the major search engines for ranking. Specific anchor text links help a site to rank better for that particular term/phrase at Google and other search engines.
Hence, you should obtain links with your keyword phrases in the anchor text.
The link popularity (the number of other websites linking to a site) of a website affects the value of all the links in hosted documents on the site. Highly linked to sites will provide more value in their links than sites whose link popularity is low.
So, the more link popularity of your link partner, the more value is provided by the links from his/her website.
Topical communities are measured by the search engines as groups of websites who interlink to and with one another frequently and carry a similar topic or theme. Since topical communities are relevant and "on-topic", the links from them carry great weight. A site that is included in a topical community by way of links from many other members may be considered more relevant and authoritative on the community's subject matter.
From this we can make a conclusion that you mainly have to find websites that are related to the topic of your own websites. One of the fast ways to find a right website is to examine its title. Does it contain your keyword? If so, you should approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.
Page Rank is the actual Google PageRank of the webpage linking to your website. Again, you should be looking for link partners which PageRank is higher than yours.
And some other factors...
As you might understand, this is just an introduction to SEO off-page factors, but can already put you on the right path.
The search engine optimization really requires a lot of efforts and the biggest problem is that it is extremely time consuming. You have to make a lot of researches to find the right sites that can provide good and useful links, you have to contact them and convince them to link to your site (usually offering a link back), you have to monitor that these sites continue to link to your site, you have to constantly update links on your webpages making sure that nobody gets extra-value with the help of your links, etc.
Yes, it definitely is harder than it can seem from my short description... And you already know it if you already tried to win your personal SEO battle.
Anyway, don't ever give up! You say you'll never be able to get top ten rankings? Bullshit! — remember that aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway ;) Be a bumblebee, don't be afraid of those "#1 monsters", just do what you need to do and you'll be a winner!
The problem is that they are just trying to do what they did many years ago hoping that this could bring the same results...
Stuff and nonsense!
Years ago it was much simpler to be liked by search engines, more or less you had to know how a webpage had to be built, and how to optimize it for your keywords, placing the keywords in the title, in the meta tags and in the body of the page. Then you put some links to some of the big websites and you were done! Even a link exchange page was an optional.
This was the old way to make SEO. Search engine optimization wasn't yet popular as a SEO acronym and the search engines had not yet moved most of the importance from the on-page to the off-page criteria.
As soon as Google introduced link analysis, the death of on-page criteria was imminent. By analyzing external links that point back to your web site, Google assumes that the more of these inbound links your site has, the more relevant your site is compared to a site that has few or no inbound links. It's like an online vote of confidence.
Today off-page factors rule in the Google algorithm, and you simply cannot achieve top rankings for your keywords if you don't work a lot on the off-page optimization of your site.
Remember, it is off-page optimization that really makes a difference in your website's ranking.
So, what are off-page optimization factors anyway? Google now takes into consideration factors like these ones:
|
How many websites are linking to you
Which sites are linking to you What is the page title of the website linking to you What is the Google PageRank of these sites Which anchor text is used to link to your site ...and more |
And these SEO factors are extremely relevant in determining the ranking of your website.
So, "off-page optimization" means you have to work on building links to your website. To keep it as simple as possible you need to get many links to your site trying to have them from sites with a high page rank and related content.
Here are some things you should pay attention to when building links:
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the actual text used within an <a> tag:
This is extremely important to use the right anchor text, with the most important keywords for your site there, as it is one of the largest factors taken into account by the major search engines for ranking. Specific anchor text links help a site to rank better for that particular term/phrase at Google and other search engines.
Hence, you should obtain links with your keyword phrases in the anchor text.
Link Popularity of a Link Partner's Website
The link popularity (the number of other websites linking to a site) of a website affects the value of all the links in hosted documents on the site. Highly linked to sites will provide more value in their links than sites whose link popularity is low.
So, the more link popularity of your link partner, the more value is provided by the links from his/her website.
Popularity of Site in Topical Community
Topical communities are measured by the search engines as groups of websites who interlink to and with one another frequently and carry a similar topic or theme. Since topical communities are relevant and "on-topic", the links from them carry great weight. A site that is included in a topical community by way of links from many other members may be considered more relevant and authoritative on the community's subject matter.
From this we can make a conclusion that you mainly have to find websites that are related to the topic of your own websites. One of the fast ways to find a right website is to examine its title. Does it contain your keyword? If so, you should approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.
Page Rank
Page Rank is the actual Google PageRank of the webpage linking to your website. Again, you should be looking for link partners which PageRank is higher than yours.
And some other factors...
As you might understand, this is just an introduction to SEO off-page factors, but can already put you on the right path.
The search engine optimization really requires a lot of efforts and the biggest problem is that it is extremely time consuming. You have to make a lot of researches to find the right sites that can provide good and useful links, you have to contact them and convince them to link to your site (usually offering a link back), you have to monitor that these sites continue to link to your site, you have to constantly update links on your webpages making sure that nobody gets extra-value with the help of your links, etc.
Yes, it definitely is harder than it can seem from my short description... And you already know it if you already tried to win your personal SEO battle.
Anyway, don't ever give up! You say you'll never be able to get top ten rankings? Bullshit! — remember that aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway ;) Be a bumblebee, don't be afraid of those "#1 monsters", just do what you need to do and you'll be a winner!
