Tag Archives: Backlink

2013 Local SEO Predictions. Content Marketing Is Phooey

2013 Local SEO Predictions. Content Marketing is Phooey.

I am going against the general concord in SEO circles this year (what a shock right?) on what will work for SEO firms in 2013, and make a big statement.  Links matter more than ever, and are in fact (after your on site work) the absolute most important aspect to any successful SEO program.

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

There is a ton of content marketing, and social signal pundits in SEO since Panda and Penguin marched into town burning and destroying all search rankings developed with sophomoric and thoughtless tactics, that will tell you the only path to high Internet traffic is through a massive content marketing strategy.  The mass hysteria that  followed has been epic.

I have read a great volume of blogs’ and posts on “how to “implement SEO now that every thing has changed. The truth is, very few “things” have changed, and authors are simple feeding a hungry and worried Internet Marketeering community.

I recently posted on a very popular blog (about local SEO issues) that the loss of keyword information from Google was not a really big deal for local services. I mean, if you need a keyword tool to tell you how people find a local Plumber, you may want to get another gig. SEO is not for you in 2013. Most will use the word Plumber. Maybe add service, company, a city, I mean there just are not all that many combo’s to figure out. In my experience, what is important in local internet visibility is not the combination of keywords a prospect uses, but how they use those combinations in search. Most SEO firms won’t even report (because there is no automated tool to do so) how a site ranks in important local zip codes with no local intent term used. And this is becoming the MAJOR search type for local services.

 

English: White hat seo symbolizes good ethic t...

This race to content now being promoted as the SEO tactic de jour may be exactly what we think it is when it comes to non local sites.  For local sites, and local SEO, which is where the vast majority of us plow the ground, it is in many cases complete phooey. Not that great content is phooey, just that this obsession with great content as the number one all in one SEO device is phooey. Google wants a site to communicate the information a person goes to that site for (I am guessing). A local plumber doesn’t need to be the Robert Frost of the copper pipe crowd, to rank well.  They just need to have a well designed 4 or 5 page site, giving people what they want to read and see when they get there.

Example: In the last 4 months we have ranked a site with one page of actually content (two pages total) for a local intent keyword, by adding a few local back links, using an emd, and ummm that was it. Does it have much competition?  Yes, some.  Would it ever have a chance of ranking on a national search? No. And that’s the point; Local SEO is to National SEO what Physics is to the M theory.  They both deal with universe in completely different ways.

So for Local SEO in 2013:

  • Backlinks to your site will continue to be the number one (off site) ranking factor.
  • On Site SEO will continue to be important.

That’s it.

PS  A backlink doesn’t mean a listing on a horrible directory that no one ever visits. It means a mention of your site on a site that real people who might be interested in your service visit, and may actually click through to your site based on that visit. It may also mean an advertisement on a highly promoted site, or a mention on a popular face book or linked in page.   This hasn’t change in the last 2 years. Spammy directories and link wheels where never good for SEO. If you were using those and keyword stuffing and all of that, then I will agree with you, your SEO has changed a lot.

 

By Mike Bayes


 

 

 

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How To Find Good Backlinks

Denver SEO: How to Find Good Back Links

Finding high quality back links for local search engine optimization after the Google algorithm changes this year can be a very big challenge.  Here are some tips on not only finding good links, but also avoiding the bad links that can hurt your site rankings.

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

First go search for your businesses key words.  Now find the sites that in one way or another would allow you to add your site and go through the check list.

Tip One:If you would use the link if Google didn’t exist.  This is huge. Good links stand on their own merit. Is this a site or page you would want your customers to see you on, and, is this a site or page that your customers might even see?

Tip Two: Does the page show up in searches for your keywords?  Hey, if your customers are going to find you on the page they are going to use keywords for your service. Use multiple search engines for this.

Tip Three: Does the page have a Google Page Rank?  If the Page rank is zero, move along.  It’s a good sign it was penalized.  SEOmoz recently did an excellent article on how many web directories that had been listed in their recommended list, as well as the Directory Maximizer (a separate site and entity)  where banned or penalized by Google this year. You might be surprised how many on the later list were banned and penalized, as well as a hand fold from the SEOmoz list.

Tip Four: If your site has a blog, list it in the better blog directories. Search Blog Directories to find them. Or add your city in the search.

Tip Five: When you look at as many back links as we do (or any Internet Marketing company does) there is no question that a Dex listing will help your site. BUT DO NOT USE any of their services that require a tracking number. This can kill any ranking progress.

Tip Six: Go quality not quantity. Listing your site in every local directory you can find won’t hurt you (perhaps), but it won’t help you much either. Go with the Local directories where people will actually see you. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, Angie’s List are the main directories.  Best of the web and a bunch of others won’t hurt, but we rarely if ever see traffic to a client’s site through those.

Tip Seven: Independent review sites can be excellent sources of traffic and good for your sites ranking. I will say no more.

Tip Eight: The harder the link is to acquire the more likely it’s a good link. Forums fall under this, and even a few blog comments.

Tip Nine: Use Google Plus both personally and for your business. Google plus is far more search engine friendly than any other Social media site.

Tip ten: Make sure your site has had an SEO review by a good SEO company.  You can go through all of the above and spend hours a day for a year doing web site promotion, but if your site isn’t SEO friendly, its all for nothing.

Quick list of good sites a Local Site should be on:

Better Business Bureau

Google Places

Yahoo Local

Bing Local

Yelp

Angie’s list

DEXknows  ( With qualifier stated above)

Blog listings Sites:

Bloglines

Blogged

Blogarama

I could go into detail about how to identify a good link from a bad, but that’s been written about extensively.  If you want to learn more or go deeper into “How To Do SEO” I recommend :

SEOmoz.org   (has a free and paid membership)

searchengineland.com

SEObook.com

If we can be of any help feel free to call. 303 500 3053

Visit us at http://www.salesjumpstart.net

 

 

 

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Is Google Penalizing Sites for Profile Behavior

Is Google Penalizing Sites for Profile Behavior?

I think it’s true, Google is a profiler. Your back link profile, and timing of it all.

  • It appears to me that Google is now Penalizing sites based on Back Links showing up in unnatural “Batches”.
  • It seems logical that Google is grading your entire Back Link profile based on new logic that includes when and how often Links are acquired, not only the source of those back links.

If your web sites back link Profile looks like this: with the line representing a week or a month interval with very little new back links in between those intervals, you look pretty unnatural don’t you?

_____30 links__________27 Link___________30 Links ___________27 links

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JUNE 06: Brian McClendon, ...
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – JUNE 06: Brian McClendon, Google VP of Engineering for Google Maps, speaks during a news conference about Google Maps o

Let’s say you’re Google. You really dislike any attempt to manipulate your algorithm.  So you want to build in a bunch of signals that will tell you when a site is trying to unnaturally manipulate its rankings in your search results.

So you bring together your very talented spam group, and some of the best engineers in the world and come up with what you would consider sure fire signs and signals that a web site is trying to game the system, and you  make some pretty big (and good) changes to how you rank sites.  Many of you know these changes as “Panda”, and “Penguin” up dates.  You can search either to find an abundance of SEO information about this. It rocked some of the SEO world.

But something that hasn’t been discussed recently showed up in a blog post at http://blumenthals.com/blog/ and written by one of the Internets best “local SEO’ guys, Mike Blumenthal.

It relates, in this instance to “Local SEO” and how Google perceives reviews posted in bunches. Basically there have been all sorts of problems recently where a business has several clients’ review them and it never shows up on their Google Places Listing. The Blog I linked to above, and response from Google explains that when they see a bunch of reviews come in at once, or over a short period of time, it can flag them as spam reviews because they assume the business has sent out a request for those reviews. Google wants reviews to be a natural occurrence. So reviews are good, requesting reviews are bad, and that’s how they assume you have requested reviews from your customers. And that is (in my opinion) exactly how Google feels about back links to a web site.

Now, those of us how have been in Internet Marketing and Web Promotion for long time understand that if you just throw 1000 links at a page over a short period of time, that you may get a nice ranking for a day or week, but the “bounce” effect will pull that ranking down pretty fast,  nothing new there,  but what does seem new to me is not only will throwing a bunch of links at one time hurt your rankings, but building links in “batches” may hurt your rankings as well. Isn’t that the same premise as getting a bunch of reviews at once… it’s just not natural.

Now clearly this will depend on the type of back links.  It is natural, one would assume that if your blog gets picked up by a national site, or distributed by them to their national audience, that you will get a “Batch” of back links. Seems natural right?  Happens to our site now and then, and we never see much happen in the negative way. Those back links all come from Internet Marketing type sites, and all quote the same blog or information.

But….. (drum Roll)….If those “batches” of back links are from less than high quality sites, (like free directories), or low value blog’s, or low value blog comments, or completely unrelated sites, or social bookmarks, I would assume Goggle may ignore them, or actually penalize your site rankings.  Yes, I think they are now penalizing for Profile Behavior, as much as for the Back Links to your site.

And it seems to me that a profile penalty is about the hardest predicament to overcome. It’s kind of like having to walk around town with a convicted felon sticker on your head and Google is the Police.

So it all goes back to doing web visibility and  PR as if Google Didn’t exist. In many ways the last year of changes to how Google ranks sites have changed how an SEO or a web master should view rankings forever. If your SEO is using 2011 tactics, you may be heading in the wrong direction.

 

 

 

 

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How To Link Build for SEO

How to Link build, and a List of Links for SEO.

Learn How To Become A Great Link Builder

Over the next few months you are going to learn how to become a great builder of back links, and we are going to not only teach you how we do it, but provide you with weekly opportunities we have found to help you see that our system of acquiring web visibility is white hat and powerful.

So how many times has a business owner  or anyone searched for, or wished for, a simple list of links that they can use to add their site url and magically watch their web site rankings move up in the organic search results?

225,000  searches

Google Chrome
Google Chrome (Photo credit: thms.nl)

According to my Google Ad Words Keyword tool, that term is searched about 22,000 times a month in the United States.  “How to link build” is around 65,000, add the associated terms and you are well above 225,000 searches a month.  For those of us in the Internet Marketing world, that doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but when you consider that a quarter of a million searches are completed looking for either a list of SEO links, or how to build back links, that’s a bunch of interest.

Get a couple Links a week

English: White hat seo symbolizes good ethic t...
Image via Wikipedia

I want to start giving a couple of good linking opportunities a week here. That should help some of you who are in the do it yourself mode, and also provide some additional evidence, through your feedback, that these sites actually send traffic to your web site. Other local SEO’s may find this helpful as augmenting their SEO work for local clients.

But first I want you to understand our philosophy on search engine visibility. You should only take an action that you would take if Google and the rest of the search engines didn’t exist. Why? Because if you are adding your site to a directory, or commenting on  a blog, or buying URL’s and building mini sites, or writing a bunch of different blogs, or book marking your site on social book marking web sites, for the sole purpose of increasing your rankings, you are heading for big trouble.  That’s the stuff Google and Bing don’t like, and are continuing to develop tactics to identify these questionable links, and downgrade or penalize the sites. When they do that, your site loses trust, and can fall off the rankings chart.  Why work hard on a tactic that is eventually going to fail?

Not only will we be providing a few great sites you can add your site to, but, we also want to teach you how to find good opportunities to build your web visibility.

How do you get the link information, just subscribe to our news letter, and we will send you out the information weekly. Sign up here http://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/d.jsp?llr=kgftjqcab&p=oi&m=1102206047434

Just choose if you want just SEO tips, or want the Sales Tips as well. I look forward to your feedback!

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SEO and Social Media

SEO and Social Media.

We all know that social media has to be taken into account when you are trying to promote your web site and brand. The question is, what social media really makes an impact on your sites ranking?  There are lots of studies about this, but the vast majority really don’t look at it through a local prospective.

Our Social Media Test (Facebook shares)

Social Media Cafe

So a few months ago we decided to try and improve a new clients ranking through using only the one social signal we feel is the most important for SEO, that being, Face Book shares. It should be noted the site did have some back links to the homepage, but there had been no new back links in months.

Share our Facebook comment will ya?

We asked lots of local friends who had face book pages to share a post or two from our client’s facebook page. That resulted in 29 different shares. Not much if you are Coca Cola, but a significant amount for a local company. The results were interesting.

Rankings improved with Facebook Shares!

The rankings went from third page on Google for the major key word , to 9th position first page. Now, the keyword would be considered a mid level competitive keyword, so that type of progress isn’t mind blowing, but it is significant.

SEO + Social Media = The new P.R.

Just another case that demonstrates how SEO is becoming more related to P.R.  than ever. The fact is you don’t need social media to have a well ranked site (I am speaking local sites here), but it sure seems to help. No doubt that will continue and become stronger.

That is also one of the reasons we developed www.metasocialweb.com (as a partner). It allows business owners to help other businesses while they get more followers and shares.

Look for more of this

I predict we will see more and more of these type services in the next year as the SEO and Social Media communities start to realize they are very related, like it or not.

If we can help you with your sites rankings and P.R.  call me at 303 500 3053 ext 1.

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Pay for links, Yes or No?

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Should you pay for a link?  Yes, and no.

This answer was once a 100% no for us.  But as SEO has become more and more competitive, we see many more sites in the top of the Search Engine results that are paying for links, and appear to getting better rankings because of it.

The type of links I am referring to here are directory links, not text in blog link farms, or anything developed for the sole purpose of getting your rankings to increase, with very little or no real readership.

A good link should have the potential to bring you more traffic, on its own, period.  There are a ton of directories that are free, and do show up high enough in the search engines, or do their own advertising, to bring real prospects to our site.  It does take some research to identify them, and the directories you choose should be dictated by the industry and location you are in.

It’s logical that a directory charge if the edit and review every submission, and have the expenses of keeping the site running.  Although we are a big fan or organic natural ranking increases through great content and relationships, now and then paying for a directory listing does make sense.

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Do It Yourself SEO (DIY SEO)

Google Appliance as shown at RSA Expo 2008 in ...
Image via Wikipedia

Do It Yourself SEO

Do it yourself SEO use to be a lot easier before the Google Panda updates and all the new algorithm changes. Many of today’s better search engine optimization companies really learned through the Do it your self process.

The big difference between a few years ago and today is the complexity involved for a site owner, or web design firm in the SEO process.  We do offer DIY SEO help, so feel free to check out our web optimizers club if this is your intent, or if you are a SEO looking for a little edge.

Here are the big basics for organic SEO. I will cover Local SEO in the next blog.

(Before we start… one point. You optimize a page, not your site. Chose the page you are going to work on. Generally the home page is good, but it can be any page on your site)

The first, and absolutely most important part of search engine optimization is know the keyword or Keyword phrase that will produce the most amount of good traffic volume to your page.  Use Google keyword tools to find out the volume of searches for your product or service. (https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none )

Just type in your service or product name, and watch the results. Spend some time playing with it. This is important.  If you hit the mark here everything else in SEO is easier.

Once you know your keyword, the following three points are huge. And just taking a page that may be missing these areas, and changing two of them can make a big difference in rankings.

1.)    Your sites Meta Title should have your keyword or keyword phrase as the FIRST words in the Title.  And add any “like” words after that.

2.)    Your sites Meta Description should have your keyword phrase as the first words in the description, and repeated if possible. No longer than 70 characters.

3.)     Your web page URL should have the keyword phrase in the URL if possible. If you are starting a new site, get a domain with the keywords in it. If it’s to late, either skip this and understand you will need to have more back links than other sites with all of the above in the page, or optimize a new page on your site that you include the keyword in the URL.  Example www.yoursitename.com/bagelshop ( If you are optimizing Bagel Shop)

Those are the big ones.  I am assuming your page will have well written copy that uses your keyword phrase a few times, it might even be in the BOLD or in the first heading and paragraph on the page.  That would just be natural.

If you don’t understand some of this, any web firm can help you, and it takes about, umm, 10 minutes for them to do the actual Meta work, and change a page name.

After that, you have to move on to back linking and some social media links.  I will cover that in another blog.  I do need to mention, that in DIY SEO and all SEO most Search Engine Optimization companies will agree, that the Back links (Links from other sites to your site) are by far the number one factor in your ranking. So why didn’t I put that above the 1,2 and 3.? Because, if you don’t get the Meta and URL stuff right, the back link work and promotion won’t do you a lot of good.

Feel free to email me questions, and do check out our web optimizer club if you want to do your own SEO. It can talk as little as 15 minutes a day with the right tools.

My email info@myonecall.com

Mike Bayes

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Google Citation and Links DEnver

Interesting Changes in Citations and Links this year.

Last year, as a matter of practice , when we did on line visibility programs for clients we added directory links to many of the major on line directories, yellow pages, and other local web sites.  We would then track the traffic from each (as part of the analytics) and quality scoring. Part of that was watching the back links report to see when the listing, citation or link was “indexed”.

We do much more than just this process during on line visibility programs, so we have a very rounded profile to drive traffic to a clients site.

The interesting thing is,  most of the local directory and y.p sites are no longer showing up as links, or as indexed, and the traffic to a clients site from these sources is way down

 

Here is an example.  Hot Frog has traditional been a good citation site and gets a lot of traffic.  But sine January, we have not seen a clients listing appear as a link to there site, and traffic is almost non existent.

This listing has been live for almost three months. No sign of it any where on Google Web Master, SEOmoz reports and any other reports we use.

I could add 10 more examples here.  But the point being, has the search world stopped recognizing this directory listings?  And if so how valuable are they to driving traffic to a site.

Let me know what you have seen.

 

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