Link building and community involvement are great and no doubt, if executed professionally, will embed your web site into the audiences that are looking for your products and services. There is another way to obtain links which pushes you closer to becoming the authority, has a longer lasting viral effect, and contributes to your web sites growth and allows your web site to become a true asset to your community. All of this for roughly the same cost of more traditional link building.
Calculate how much money you have spent on Link Building, thus far. 20 links of varying PR at an average of $20 will cost you $400. This example is likely small for many of you, but $400 is a lot of money especially when you consider copy writing costs or potentially saving that money and writing a bit of content yourself --you’re the expert, right? Your expense is now time that is invested into your website, instead of others. You are the expert, right, don’t forget that transferring the knowledge to the copy writer takes time.
If you were to write one decent blog post or one decent article related to your industry, it is likely to contain many of the keywords you are targeting. If you write this content to be informative, catchy, entertaining, yet educational, you will notice a whole new type of link building, which will get you more bang for your buck. This one article has the potential to be linked to from many users who found your article useful and want to share it with others. To get 20 links on an article of this caliber would be a simple thing and likely generate more. You would have spent the same, if not less, and contributed something meaningful to your industry or community and are one step closer to building your online persona or identity.
This is often referred to as Link Bait. You’re using your knowledge or expertise to entice others to link to your information and they will do so, because they found it useful and want to share it with others in their community. This is often done with videos, freebies, useful online tools, quizzes, games, and yes, simply content.
If you haven’t already… check out Google Trends.
All web site owners want as much search traffic as they can get but, many are missing out. If you are only advertising in Google AdWords you may be reaching the majority of searchers but, does your industry niche use Google? What if they use Yahoo or Microsoft? What if another, smaller, search engine provides better niche traffic? Do you know your audience and have you optimized your PPC campaign for them?
If you've been around the Web for any length of time, you've heard of SEO—or, if you're not familiar with the acronym, Search Engine Optimization. It's the process of making sure you're your Web pages rank at or near the top when people do a search in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com, or whatever search engine they use.
Over the past few years, as SEO has become big business and CMS products commonplace, a concern has arisen that a CMS can hinder getting high scores in search engine rankings. And these rumors of poorly behaved CMS products fouling up your SEO, sadly, were true. What many people don't know, however, is that over time both CMS products and search engines have grown up and they get along much better these days without needing anywhere near as much “supervision.” When you look at URLs, for example, often for any kind of page that is fully or partially generated “on the fly,” you'll see parameters—basically non-English strings (&var=value) of text with question marks, ampersands and numbers, that only mean something to the system reading them. Content management systems are masters at generating these undecipherable URLs. Problem was, for a long time, the search engines weren't great at reading them. When search engines relied heavily on URLs with few to no parameters, this was a big problem. But now that search technologies focus more on the content on the page and linking, the unruly URL is much less of a barrier than it used to be. Yes, it's nice to provide user-friendly URLs, but it's no longer a show-stopper for search rankings and indexing. Another behavioral problem had to do with tags. For those of you who learned HTML “from scratch”, you know what these are. They are HTML tags put at the top of each page that provide metadata—information that says what the page is about, including the description and keywords. They don't show up in your Web browser, but search engines can see them. In the old days, immature CMS products, while they may have been easy to use for entering content, didn't always give users a place to specify meta information for each page. Thus, search engines, some of which used meta tags as their primary indexing mechanism, would see every page of the site as the same page. Consequently, your pages were virtually invisible to the search engines. Nowadays, most CMS products provide easy interfaces for SEO and prompt users to enter titles, descriptions, keywords and even allow you to write your own URLs. Problem solved. Search engines still look at URLs and meta tags, but, as they have gotten more sophisticated, rely on them much less, and more on the actual content-- the words actually on the page. So the issue of your CMS circumventing your desire to play nicely with search engines is much less bothersome. Now, rather than your tech team focusing on the mechanics of SEO or mod_rewrite within your CMS, your writers can focus on the art of SEO, which is in the content itself.News and history junkies take heart: Google's new News Archive Search lets you search back over twenty decades worth of historical content, including scads of articles not previously available via the search engine.
"The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore how history unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, Google distinguished engineer, who played a major role in shepherding the new product.
Google has partnered with news organizations including Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, and aggregators including Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research, to index the full-text of content going back 200 years.
ESPN.com said it is ending its deal with Yahoo to show text ads on its Web pages, choosing instead to sell the placements itself.
ESPN plans to roll out its own Google-like auction system for placing text-link ads on its site, letting advertisers target placements based on keyword or section. The ad system, which uses New York firm Quigo's AdSonar platform, will be up and running this fall, the company said.
Big companies with huge budgets certainly make it more difficult for smaller search marketers to compete, but ingenuity and creativity can still provide a compelling competitive advantage regardless of budget constraints.
The "Big Ideas for Small Sites & Small Budgets" session at SES featured several search marketing experts sharing helpful tips for small business marketers.
It's no surprise that small businesses were well represented at SES. After all, it was smaller firms that primarily drove the first wave of growth for the explosive search engine marketing industry. But today, with Fortune 1000 companies crashing the search marketing party, many small firms are wondering if the Web really is the "great equalizer" they hoped for. What was once a small businesses' best kept secret has now become part of nearly every marketer's mix.
Maintaining and marketing a website can be a difficult task especially for those who are inexperienced or who have very little experience. SEO rules are constantly changing and even then, many SEO professionals disagree on the actual specifics required to optimize a website. This is in no small part due to the search engines themselves.
Major search engines like Google are constantly striving to ensure that sites at the top of their result pages offer invaluable information or service to their visitors. However, webmasters who are looking to make quick money while offering very little quality content are always finding new ways to beat the search engines at their own game. For this reason, search engines regularly change the methods they use to determine relevancy and importance of your site.
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