Website SEO: Link building, step 6

Link building is important because the more sites link back to you the more authority your site has in the eyes of a search engines. It’s like “it’s better when people tell good things about you, than when you go and talk about yourself”.

Not all links are created equal. These are some of the key things that differentiate links:

• dofollow and nofollow links. In other words, links that transfer
• one way, two way and even three way. You should be interested in one way links.
• links from directories, social bookmarking sites, blog articles, blog comments, etc. The more diverse your links sources are the better.
• links from quality, trusted, authoritative websites. These links you need! Although it may take awhile to get a link from an authority website, but it’s definitely worth it. For example your article gets published in TechCrunch. Or your product is cited in New York Times.
• links from general resources and industry-specific resources

Without getting into too many details, there’s a few things to keep in mind when linkbuilding:

• Pay attention to both quantity and quality, having said that quality of links is always more important. It’s way better to have one link from New York Times and a hundreds thousands of links from questionable directories.
• Make sure links that you are getting are from relevant resources (for the most part).
• Anchor text is super important. Anchor is linked text. A good anchor for an SEO Service company is SEO Service. Also make sure to differentiate your anchors. For example, instead of using just SEO Service use multiple anchors like SEO company, SEO Service, SEO Reports, etc.
• Take a snapshot of your current link profile (sites that link back to you). There’s a section on how to do it in my previous post on taking SEO performance snapshots. Once you have that base number you can track your month-to-month easily.

There are tools available that will help you discover sites to link to, monitor your link building activity and manage your link building process. Below are only a few options for link building tools.

• Backlink watch (Free): helps you monitor who links back to you, what anchor text is used and if it’s a dofollow or nofollow link.
• Link Builder tool from Wordtracker (Paid): I have not used it but for some reason I trust these guys. This is supposed to be a multi-purpose tool to help you run your link building program.
• Linkscape and Open Site Explorer tools by SEOmoz (Free): these two are free link building tools from a reliable vendor.
• List of tools at Search Engine Land (Free and paid): this is a comprehensive list of solid tools by a solid publisher.

This list should be sufficient. You can, of course, search Google to find more link building tools but I recommend you get to work of actually link building and NOT looking for better tools and evaluating alternatives. Believe me, I spent countless hours looking at tools only to find out that the link building work was not happening.

Online marketing, SEO and launching a new website

A friend of mine, Ernest Barbaric, (Congratulations, Ernest!) has just re-launched a website and asked me about tools he should use and steps he should take to tweak up the new site. We had a conversation with a few messages back and forth. This series of posts is a result of that conversation.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when approaching SEO for a new / re-designed website. These are general steps that I’ve tried, tested, improved. Please note that this is a general process, and I will go into specifics of each step in future posts.

Think about your product, step 1

The key in search engine optimization is simple: think about it. Think about your product and how people could refer to it. Brainstorm a few combinations. Ask friends, colleagues, clients, partners, vendors. As a result you’ll come up with a list of 5-10 key phrases. SEO Tools: paper & pencil, or white board and a marker. Some of you may want to start a spreadsheet. It may be useful down the road.

Keyword research, step 2

Once you have a list of those approximate terms it’s time to look at what people are actually searching for. Use tools that are usually provided by major search engines themselves for free. First, test the terms that you’ve brainstormed to see if people are searching for those. Look at other keyword phrases recommended by the tools. The goals here are to 1) select the most relevant terms, 2) select the term with existing search volume, 3) stay away from super competitive keywords. Then shorten you list of terms to 3-5 most relevant to your site. These terms and their variations (for long tail terms) will be used further. Here’s a great review of 20 free keyword research tools.

SEO Implementation, step 3

There’s a few things to keep in mind: have one terms for the entire site, and 3-4 other terms for other pages on your site. Focus on optimizing one terms per page. For example, if you sell natural cosmetics in Calgary, then this should be your title for either the homepage or one of your other pages. Some of the tools your can use to analyze on-page components of your website: Website SEO Analyzer, W3Optimizer, Website Grader.

Search engine submission, step 4

Yes, search engine spiders crawl the web and will eventually get to your site. I like to inform search engines about major changes on my sites as changes happen. I use webmaster tools that each of major search engines have (Google, Yahoo, Bing). Have an XML sitemap ready just in case (not super crucial but desirable). Here are webmaster pages for major search engines: Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center.

Baseline performance snapshot, step 5

This is one of the most important step of all. This snapshot is a starting point from which you will track your progress. There are a few free tools that will allow you to take performance snapshots and measure it over time including: WebCEO, Raven Tools, etc.

Link building, step 6

Can’t stress this enough. Links are super important. But don’t fall into a trap of doing a one-time blast and forgetting about it. The process should be continuous. The links should be one way from resources that are relevant to your industry. The idea is that other people consider your site important and link to you. You can check the sites that link back to you using the follow two tools: Open Site Explorer by SEOmoz and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

SEO maintenance, step 7

SEO is not a one-time engagement. Search engines change their algorithms, people change their search habits, the world changes. So, make a habit of checking on results regularly (once or twice a month). Either leave as is and continue link building. Or tweak your titles to add / remove / change target keywords.

This outlines the process in general. Stay tuned for a a detailed article on each of the steps.