SEO, Link Building, Link Popularity - What The? The "Easy Guide" to Scoring Higher In Search Engines

Well - I’m not an expert on this, but it's something I've been looking into lately because I never seem to get anywhere in the search engines - so I thought I'd share my findings with those that want an easy-to-follow article (basically - for those just starting out - not your SEO gurus)...

What I do know is that you have to build a lot of links - and that your page ranking isn't as good as it used to be (so a site with a page rank of 5 may be lower down in the google directory than a site with a page rank of 3 for example).

So - how do websites get to the front page in google then - how do you build these links, and can you just build any link (can you put 1000 links on one page)? Well - no - you have to build effective links. (So you can go & cancel that 100 website subscription you just purchased - you need links from OTHER people, not your own websites - this will get you penalised BIG TIME).

As well as looking at the link, google looks at the type of link it is. Is it relevant, where is the link placed on the page, where is the link placed in the website (e.g. what page - index, link page etc..), whether the link is an ad, or part of the text, whether the link is a picture or banner.

And - to throw a curveball in there - google not only looks at links, they also looks at things such as the title of the page, the H1 tags, and the META tags. There is also a new algorithm that google has been testing out, and that's how words relate to each other (e.g. how food relates to wine) - this is called Latent Symantec Indexing (LSI). LSI will look at the title tag, and the text on the page that your link is on (note what I said there - not on your own page - on the page your link is on).

All very confusing!

As you are aware there are are loads of ways to increase your links - some good, some not so good. Different methods include - link exchange, 3-way link exchange, banner adverts, text adverts, blogging etc. At the moment, the best way to build your links is blog linking (or article linking). And... because the blogs tend to be permanent, it is also one of the most cost effective. If you can afford to get links from several hundred, or even several thousand blogs - you should do this. It is well worth your advertising money (and remember - because they last - you only need to do it once - although I would probably do it once per year or more - to further increase your name).

There are a few companies that have "blogs for sale" - where a blogger will write about your product or website. The bloggers will generally use whatever url you specify, and whatever keywords you specify. You aren’t going to get a small ad - you are going to have a complete blog (often on it’s own url) written about your website. And, because the bloggers want to maintain their blogs to a high quality - they'll write fantastic page-long ads about your product! So if you’re looking to increase link popularity visit one of the blog services - get the ones where the bloggers actually write the ad into the blog or article - rather than just an ad at the bottom or in the sidebar.

After all of that rambling - that's what I got out of my research!

Happy link building...