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Why is SEO Not One of Your Top Priorities?

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aseo

Name your top priorities as a business owner.

There is a good chance items like keeping your finances in the black, hiring and retaining the best employees and having the best customer service going are among things you zero in on.

With that said, where does maintaining a strong SEO presence rank? Wait, you are not even up to speed on SEO for starters?

For those a little late to the game, SEO means Search Engine Optimization. If you are not familiar with it, take the time to get familiar sooner rather than later.

With more and more consumers turning to online browsing and buying, business owners must have a solid website that ranks high on Google and other search engines.

When that is not the case, your site can be hard to find in generic searches, oftentimes leaving your competitor/s to rake in the business.

Finding the Right SEO Agency

In order to get your SEO game on and rank at or near the top of your respective industry when consumers search online, working with a knowledgeable SEO Agency is a necessity.

With many business owners glued to their finances, employees and more, knowing how to pick the right SEO agency can be a daunting challenge in some cases.

Among the factors to look at include:

  • The agency’s history and reputation. Do they have a good record or a laundry list of customer complaints;
  • What kind of service are they going to offer and is customer service a top priority? Bad customer service can be detrimental to your company;
  • Does your SEO consultant/company stay on top of various changes in the industry? If they don’t, you could find yourself getting the necessary advice a day late and a dollar short. From content to links, stay on top of what Google and others do and do not like (see below), allowing you to create the best SEO plan.

Need to Change is Important

Just as you have to make alterations in how you run your business, it is also important that your SEO provider adapt to ever-changing Google moves.

Keep in mind that Google is continually providing updates to its search algorithm during the year, so your SEO expert needs to stay abreast of such changes. If he or she doesn’t, your search ranking will suffer for it.

While your SEO provider should know all the basics from A to Z, it doesn’t hurt you as a business owner to be clued in on important facets of SEO. Keyword research and density, important backlinks, relevant content and how often you update your website are among the items you want to stay on top of.

So, feeling a little more up to speed on SEO?

If you’re still facing questions without answers, consider some of these following benefits in having a strong SEO game plan:

  1. Website experience – You want consumers coming to your site to have a positive experience. If your site does not provide this, you may not see them again, but your competition likely will;
  2. Avoiding penalties – If your site’s content is stale and/or duplicative or has that spam feel to it, Google could very well hit you with a penalty that impacts your PR (page ranking). Once that happens, it can take some time for your site to get back to a positive PR;
  3. Optimization – Last but not least, having a site that is correctly optimized gives you the ability to enhance both your search engine visibility and also your stature within the online community. Google Analytics also allow you to get a better feel for who is visiting your site, therefore helping you customize your advertising and marketing outreach.

Making SEO a priority in your daily business tasks should not be an option, it should come as a necessity.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Dave Thomas writes for a variety of websites on topics such as social media and marketing your business.

What Google Added To The Link Schemes Document Found In Webmaster Tools

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By Matthew Schmoldt

Recently, Google updated the “Link schemes” informational document found in Webmaster Tools. The change was easy to miss. There were no large scale announcements.

Unlike a Wikipedia document, there is no easy way to see what was changed. Thankfully, the Internet has the wayback machine for such matters. The tool shows that two records have been kept this year for the page in question. One archive is from June 28th, the other is from August 5th.

As you can see, there seem to be significant changes. The June 28th version of the link schemes page had an opening paragraph that explained why external links were important and why Google uses them as a key influencer in search results. Now the document begins with a stern warning:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”

To many, this paragraph is not only troubling but troublingly ambiguous. You will notice the use of the word “intended” in the paragraph. How does Google determine if a link is intended to manipulate PageRank? In the second sentence, is Google saying any link building efforts will be considered manipulation?

On July 10th, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, was interviewed and said the following:

“No, not all link building is bad. The philosophy that we’ve always had is if you make something that’s compelling then it would be much easier to get people to write about it and to link to it.”

Does the July 10th interview with Matt Cutts answer the questions of the August update to the link schemes document? My guess is, yes. Google seems to be preparing to take the webspam fight to the next level and has updated their official link schemes document with a hardcore and broad stance.

In the same interview, Matt Cutts said:

“I would concentrate on the stuff that people write, the utility that people find in it, and the amount of times that people link to it. All of those are ways that implicitly measure how relevant or important somebody is to someone else.

Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover that, and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

It is clear to me, that link building is quite appropriate and still legal. But, shift from thinking about link building to the idea of link earning. High quality links from high authority links should be the target. These sorts of links are earned and not built with a few clicks of the mouse.

What else was changed in the link schemes document?

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

The above paragraph seems to be fairly black and white. Google doesn’t want people to sell links for money or for products. But, what If you sign up for a Chamber of Commerce and pay a fee. Have you just purchased a link from their site? Should you request a nofollow of your link just in case?

Matt Cutts has said that you should only pursue a link if it is something you would have built or pursued if SEO did not exist.

Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking

The use of excessive and exclusively are ambiguous and troubling in this new entry in the document. It is impossible to know where the line is with this rule. But, remember, Google wants you to do things naturally. They want you to do things that make logical sense. If you are a flower shop, it makes sense to have a linking relationship with the local chocolate shop. It may make sense to link to the local cookie shop, to the local wedding dress store, etc.

Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links

The ambiguous word here is “large-scale.” To me, I refer back to my rule of link earning and not link building. If the link is too easy to get, it’s probably not the kind of link that is desirable. Removing the easy to get links removes most of the ability to create a large-scale link building operation. The hard links take time to get. Also remember, Google is targeting keyword-rich anchor links and not generic links in articles.

Using automated programs or services to create links to your site

This seems to be the one area where Google was decisive. Do not use automated means to build backlinks. If you are tempted to use automated programs, don’t. Google is constantly indexing the Internet and can detect a sudden and unnatural increase in backlinks.

Author’s Bio: Matthew Schmoldt is an Internet marketer who has been published at Yahoo and Moz. He has four years of SEO and social media experience. He is the owner of Cool Things To Buy Inc. His website features amazing gadgets other neat stuff.

Why Automated Link Building is Bad For Your Business

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By Rob James

A few years ago, it was common practice for businesses and Search Engine Optimisation marketers to use automated link building to increase links to their sites, with the aim of boosting a website’s PageRank in Google. However, with Google clamping down on “black hat” SEO strategies in their Penguin and Panda algorithm updates, automated link building isn’t going to do your business many favours; instead, it’s better to focus on “white hat” and organic SEO to get the most out of search.

Primarily, automated link building is all about quantity, whereby you run software and join directories to multiply the number of backlinks to your page – blog comments, and filling blogs with low quality repeated content could also enable a single website to generate large numbers of links. However, while this might be an effective method for building up a page’s ranking, automated link building is less invested in getting good quality links from relevant sites, and has been increasingly punished by Google.

The main problem that Google has with automated link building is that it can effectively represent a form of spam – multiple links from low quality sites, or spamming comments boards with links, and posting content with awkwardly placed content distorts the actual relevancy of a page for users. In this context, your business may have a high search ranking, but not one that’s necessarily made up of the right kinds of associations.

Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates were consequently designed to prevent PageRank, the main Google algorithm, from being manipulated. Panda has received 24 updates since February 2011, and crawls pages for low quality features and links to duplicate content – the emphasis with Panda is on duplicated and “thin” content, where the use of links isn’t contextually motivated, and closer to spam.

By comparison, Google Penguin, introduced in April 2012, comes down even harder on automated link building through directories – if you have a portfolio of links that are mostly from link farms and other low quality sites, then Penguin will ignore or rank these links as less relevant. It’s not perfect, but it means that Penguin is going to punish your ranking if you have too many links from low quality pages.

So, what kind of actions can you take to improve your SEO without automated link building? The most straightforward method is to focus on creating original content, and on getting high quality guest posts on blogs and pages that aren’t going to get singled out by Penguin – while there are ongoing questions about how effective Google can be at identifying the right pages to disregard, it’s clear that businesses will have to spend more time on creating great content.

It’s also important to optimise existing content and pages, and to ensure that your HTML and CSS on pages is clearly set up to ensure that they can be picked up by search engines; moreover, businesses can do their SEO a big favour by investing in social media content, which can be easily shared and recommended via social toolbars and buttons. The more organic links that you get from high ranking, trusted sites, the higher the chance will be that Google will increase the value of your own website.

Author’s Bio: Rob James is an online marketer and recommends DeepBlueSky web design to help you build a high quality site. In his spare time Rob can be found blogging about the many different linking techniques out there, which ones to apply, and which ones to avoid!

SOBCon 2009 Link Roundup

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Hello everybody! SOBCon 2009 is over. I know that many of you are sad, but guess what? There is a ton of content out there for you to re-live and re-learn some of the experience. While David Griffith is busy compiling all of the video content, I have grabbed a few of the links to posts that our amazing attendees have put together.

Thank you again to our sponsors and all of the attendees who made this conference the best yet.

Please take a look at what these folks have put together and share your thoughts in the comments:

Well that should keep you busy for a while! As an added bonus, here is a short video from Denise Wakeman at Build a Better Blog,

(Turn on flash to see it)

If you have a SOBCon post link that you would like to share in this post, please let me know in the comments.

The Building Blocks of Successful Interaction

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I just wanted to share this with you:

Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware, writing at The Future of Work, share some thought on the building blocks of interpersonal interaction:

In our experience effective communication is made up of three basic qualities: trust, connectedness; and relatedness.

Trust is the most basic quality.

Trust is an emotional thing. It comes when we share values with others and we can therefore expect them to behave in predictable ways. We trust people when we believe they will act in our best interests even though we aren’t there. And without trust true interaction and communication just isn’t possible. Trusting relationships are not based on power, or on status or one-up-manship.

Connectedness and Relatedness

Connectedness is a necessary but not sufficient condition of interaction. Simply put, it means there is a common basis for communication. Both parties are concerned about, interested in, or attracted to a similar issue, which then provides a basis for communicating. However, they must also relate to that issue. That is, they share a common belief, or a value around that issue. Note the difference. Take politics for example (or not take it, whatever). You can be connected with someone because you are both interested in the outcome of an election—but at the same time not be emotionally related (or even opposed to each other) because you have different philosophical positions. You can take that to the bank. If you are connected with someone, but not related, your communication isn’t going to go very far! Test that perspective with Uncle Barney.

Strategy: How to Get Maximum Benefit from Complex Link Lists

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More Than What One Link Shows

Strategic Plans logo

Yesterday I offered a list of blog promotion guides that are current and relevant. One could get lost, overwhelmed, or just plain bored going through all of the links contained inside the 20 of them.

Yet, it’s good practice and a great exercise to know the territory . . . to have an overview of the range of techniques and tactics folks suggest, support, and champion. Having an efficient way to cull through such a list can save time and help us see more than just what each link has to offer on its own.

Here’s how I’d use that list and any complex link list to get maximum benefit.

  1. Look over the list, before you read. What do you notice about the titles? What do you notice when you quickly click each link without reading a word? What do you predict you will find when you look further?

  2. Read through the list with an eye to the playing field. How many bloggers say the same thing? What ideas are entirely new? Note ideas that interests you.

  3. When you finish, reflect on your predictions and note the unexpected things you found.

  4. Decide which strategies work well with your blog and your readers’ needs.

  5. Make a plan for how you’ll introduce new ideas in a way that won’t disrupt what you already do.

We often do what our friends do to solve our problems. Those answers can serve us well, be all right, or not work at all. It’s so much stronger to arrive at a plan with the longer view — knowing the playing field. Even when that view is not scientific, it’s still informative. What we learn gets stored.

Negotiating a long link list of information is like driving a complicated route to a never-visited meeting spot. When we plan our route we’re more likely to reach our desired destination without wearing ourselves out.

Hope this helps.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you’d like Liz to help you find your strategy, click on the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

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