Having had the fortunate opportunity to grow up with and be an active part of the changing Internet, the Google boom and the death of the Content Portals (see now extinct so called search engines) I have through the almost seven years I have known and practiced SEO learned a few things along the way and I like to share my thoughts on today's SEO landscape and how Link Building compares to Quality Content.
Quality SEO Content
Google have once said something along the lines of "create good content and users will come", what most people in the SEO world does not like about that comment is the catch 22 of it as you need to be found as well. Google is regrettably not very good on catching new Quality Content unless it is being directed there by other sites. So how do you solve this?
But quality content on its own carries great value too so it is with this content that you actually will dominate your own rankings. Mind the fact that I am saying Quality Content which is not the same as duplicate or lazy content. This is something that is very difficult to avoid the larger your website gets.
I have worked with SEO on websites ranging from 20 indexed pages to 10 000 000 pages. Properly planned these websites can have the same amount of percentage in duplicate content warnings.
The hard part of having reduced duplicate content on larger scale websites is all down to the planning and structure set in place at the beginning, but you would not dream that your three page website you run today will explode into a ten million page website in six months. Very few people do. This is where you have to be alert and know that if you suddenly have the means and the need to create a bigger version of your website then you should also take the time to make it fool proof for the future. You may need to restrain yourself from trying to put up quick solutions to try and cope with all the demands your websites has. Spend the weeks or month it takes to put a really great system with nifty features in place and room for custom built content and features.
That you during this time only may be able to serve 70% of your potential custom is balanced out by having a great website later that is easy to control and through its sheer size can dominate most of the rankings it is targeting.
Link Building in a paranoid environment
Most webmasters regards the No-Follow as a heavensent gift as it prevents a lot of the spam occurring and as a side question I wonder if this is not causing a chicken and an egg issue as Link Building is supreme for search engines to rank you. But getting links in the paranoid environment we have today is increasingly difficult as we have several anti spam services that sometimes can pick you as being suspect, the No-Follow makes your efforts ending up in narrow areas where you will have your link among hundreds of others linking to their websites in the same purpose.
There is however an area that are not being too protected by webmasters (so far), nor is it too crowded by spam or other link builders and that is the combination sites that are half forum, half community.
The reason these sites are not too crowded yet is because of their moderation, some of them will not even allow you to post more than once every 36 hours! This kind of Link Building takes a lot of effort and you will have to maintain your presence long after the link is dropped, but the effort far outweighs the potential risk of being flagged as spammer and the high amount of unsuccessful comments you have attempted with the "drop and forget" tactic most Link Builder tactics seem to employ at the moment.
I have done it myself and I have seen proof that websites easily can reach a Page Rank of as high as 3 with only five decent Do Follow links and minimal amount of content. There is a trick to that which I will be revealing soon.
Small Scale Link Building
Small scale link building is what you do when you are a smaller website, just launched or if you are a bigger website but currently restricted or lacking the resources to build on a larger scale.
While this title would seem to contradict this little fact, it remains true that the small scale link building requires more work, since you are building links on a smaller scale you have to be more accurate with your keywords, you must have a well developed SEO Strategy as well as quality content to provide. Even the future keywords you are betting on.
Larger Scale Link Building
While this may sounds grand, epic or even daunting large scale link building is just about anything where more than one person build is links for the same purpose and target. This requires less planning and management as you would only implement focus on keywords where they are needed.
With this said you should be wary that if you have more than one person from the same building doing all these link building tactics of the possibility to become flagged, disabled or even blacklisted. Make sure you have your link builders document the amount on not approved links and even better -to keep track of the links they have already put in place, at least on a monthly basis.
The Trick Revealed
The trick is simple, just drive the traffic to your website and google will follow. This is where your SEO Strategy will be put to the test, have you researched the right words, have you located your niche and where your customers are? These answers are not ever answered with "they are on the Internet".
Your SEO Strategy must have defined, located and built quality content for these people. Once this is done you send your SEO Ambassadors forward, but do it slowly, as you will scare away your niche just as easily as the flock of birds by that fountain you walk past every morning, these birds are not particularly afraid of you, but they are not at all likely to befriend you, especially if you just barged in.
Once you have your SEO Ambassadors in place you send in the Social Media, but you arm them with the knowledge that the Ambassadors gathered during the initial approach. If successful, once the Social Media is in place you have established a presence with that niche, you may now move on to the next or keep going for dominance within this niche. Just make sure that your SEO Ambassadors and Social Media Ninjas are checking back in once in a while. A small "hello" or even a few nods in that niches direction goes a long way to keep the maintenance going.
Jim Shepherd has worked for 7 years with SEO and website optimisation in Europe and is now operating in UK where he is currently providing SEO Strategy London. These articles published here is an insight to the world of SEO and the reflections upon an ever changing landscape of online marketing.
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