SEO With no Spam

Building a website is actually the easy part of online business. Getting your site marketed and actually turning a profit is the hard and time consuming part. With so many online marketing techniques coming and going all the time, it can be a minefield out there. Some of it works, but unfortunately most of it doesn’t.

By the time you buy the latest and greatest new marketing ebooks and software, the market will already be saturated and nobody makes any money. And the internet becomes clogged up with spam websites. But fear not, there are some free and evergreen methods you can use. Here I will discuss the big one – Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.

So What’s this SEO Thing All About?

SEO is the process of optimizing and marketing a website so that it appears high up the ranks of the main search engines. Now there are three main search engines used the most on the internet today. Google is the giant of all search engines, followed by Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo Search. Each one has its own set of rules and conditions your website must comply with. This is known as a ‘search engine algorithm’, a piece of software that filters out the bad, spammy sites as well as credits the good ones.

Now the Google search algorithm changes on a daily basis. One day your site could be at the number one position on the Search Engine Results Pages (or SERP), the next day your listing could fall into the sandbox. The sandbox is the term used for the place your site listing goes when it falls outside of the SERP pages. And once your site falls into it, you will have a tough time climbing out of it. So you need to stay on top of the game and keep an eye on your search engine rankings.

Now the employees at Google don’t even know themselves which algorithm changes are being made. This would give away the game. So the changes are made by Google insiders who have signed non-disclosure agreements, and they never work in the same offices, as this would blow their cover. So really no-one on the outside knows which changes are being made and what to adjust on their websites. So it’s a kind of on-going cat and mouse game, and a lot of trial and error to stay on top.

But having said that, there are still ways of staying on top of your competition, regardless of the algorithm. The first one I will discuss is content relevancy. Google will rank your site higher if you update the site regularly with top quality, unique and informative content. A few articles a week should do the trick. But be sure that the content you use is original – the algorithms these days are very smart and complex and can even ban your site for using duplicate content. So guys, never use Private Label Rights articles ‘as is’, because such content has already been spammed across the internet already.

The other evergreen SEO technique is known as ‘link building’. This involves contacting or signing up to forums and placing links back to your site on these high traffic sites. Now you can do this yourself which can be quite time consuming. The other option is to buy backlinks cheap. Be wary of this one – be sure that the company or individual is reputable. There have been many scams about where they offer you 4000 backlinks within a week or so. Stay away from such offers, as the Google algorithm will detect a sudden burst and de-list your site. I recommend no more than five backlinks a day, so that it looks natural.

Every time you use a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing, the true inquiry you request the engine to search for is a list of links. Web links are essentially exactly what they sound like: links connecting websites and other online information to one another. Without links, the internet would not be the same amazingly mind boggling “world wide web” as we have today. These links keep every scrap of information on the internet connected together, making it a wide library of connected intelligences. Understanding how to utilize these links can exponentially increase a web page’s popularity and attract new audiences. One of the most important ways of accomplishing these seemingly daunting tasks would have to be the use of one way links.

One way links are website links that lead you to a website which does not provide a link back to the page that hosted the original link that was used. Some examples of such links can be found vastly under many Google searches. If you ever click on a Google search link to a website and on the website you cannot find a link back to Google, than the original link is a one way link. Using this idea of a “no way back” link system gives many websites a feeling of prestige because of a somewhat simple thought; “If the last website I was on recommended me to view this website and this website doesn’t recommend me to view the last website, then this website must obviously be better than the last.”

One way links are very important in directing internet surfers of all types into a better opinion of the web page they are directed to and such a decision can be made almost subconsciously by the surfer. Making the most of such links is more than necessary when forming a truly successful website.

There is a quick way of building one way links. You can simply buy text links and improve search engine ranking very quickly. You should use this in combination with other link building strategies.

Popularity and traffic on a website is based on its position in a search engine result page. The higher the position is, the probability of getting a hit is maximum. So, how can you place your web pages on top of the search engine result page? The answer is optimizing your web pages for the search engines. Link building is one of the processes adopted in search engine optimization. Literally, it is the process of availing links of the web pages of your website inside the web pages of another website. Search engines use a method called page ranking to evaluate your web pages. As the rank of a page goes higher, it is more likely to appear on top of the search results. Search engine optimization looks into various criteria, a search engine uses to rank a web page and will modify the web page friendlier to the search engine, so that it could easily evaluate your page based on the content and will assign the page a numeric value, which is the page rank.

Common criteria followed by page rank algorithms are based on the link properties. A link is a combination of url and anchor text. The anchor text must be a combination of common keywords specifically related to the content of the web page. It plays a major role to get to a higher page rank. Basically there are inbound and outbound and links. Inbound links points to your web page from outside and outbound links points to some outside page from your web page. And there are one way and reciprocal links. One way links points a web page from other another and reciprocal links are links placed between two websites in which one points to the others web page. Often, the reciprocal links are the result of mutual agreement between two webmasters. Link building populates links of all categories.

Creating a lot of outbound links won’t help your page to get a higher rank but inbound links do. The search engines are smart enough to guess up to an extent, the presence of reciprocal links and the underlying mutual agreement. This affects your page rank adversely. Reciprocal links may work for you if, the outbound of the reciprocal link is originated from a page which has a higher page rank. A page with a higher page rank is considered very popular and if you could build reciprocal links with such a web page, it helps your page to a great extent. This can be explained through two terms like, link popularity and link reputation. Link popularity is the number of outbound links points your web page from other web pages. Link reputation is based on the evaluation of the web pages from which the outbound links to your web page originated. Link reputation is closely related to the page rank. Getting a higher page rank doesn’t’ guarantee a higher position for your web page at the search result page. It needs to satisfy some other factors too. Basically a good page ranking algorithm keeps track on upon what circumstance the link was identified and how fast the link popularity increased. Link building should be focused on both link popularity and link reputation and the quality of anchor text.

There are a lot of link building techniques, like you can buy text links. When you buy links, it helps to improve link popularity of your website. But it should be done right, so search engines do not see it as the only way you use as your link building strategy.