MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

You may say that excellent content sells itself, but I say that well-written words are just not useful enough, especially if your client is selling non-tech, non-business and non-entertainment based products. One pagers of content distributed on e-zine and review sites are a shot in the dark for high volumes of traffic. Perhaps you can think of a viral idea that’s going to make a local hockey team fly out of the water. But can you think of ideas for window glazing, au pair services, locksmiths and Czech translation services, while you’re at? You may say I’m dreaming, and to that I say: you’re just asleep.

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When dodging the slavering jaws of the spambots, it’s best if your site looks like a lousy supper. That means reducing the rewards of getting the spam message onto the site. Even if spammers make the necessary code changes to help their spambots navigate the web, they may simply decide that it’s not worth the extra work and maintenance if the incentives are too low. My assumption is that spammers are in the hunt for a good Google PageRank score; it’s about boosting their results in search engines. The rel=”nofollow” tag when added to links tells Google and other search engines not to index the link. Admittedly the pace of spam has only increased since the rel=”nofollow” tag was introduced by Google and a group of blog software makers a couple of years ago. My optimistic hunch is that new apps that support this tag from the get-go won’t be as big a target. We’ll see.

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“Link Value is the perceived value another site will derive from linking to you. The more value they see, the more likely they will be to link.” - Ken McGaffin

Reciprocal links seem to be the order of the day, but very rarely offer significant value to either of the parties involved. Many feel reciprocal links offer the most immediate value to most sites.

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There has been some ongoing discussion about whether or not Google should penalise sites with a large amount of footer links. Footer links are something that we have all come across while surfing the net, and in a link-building environment, web pages are easier to surf using footer links.

In a post I read from Seroundtable, it is said that the footer links wont actually be penalised if your links are relevant and kept under a certain limit. I fully agree with this. If you have over 100 links with all different anchor text, Google might crawl your site and lose what the true content in your site covers. Whereas if your footer links are all relevant, and there are not a lot of them, it might work to your advantage. Relevance to the content would be the key to remember when creating footer links.

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Matt Cutts has said that Google considers buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside their quality guidelines and wants to eradicate all unnatural linking.

Sites that publicly sell links have been penalised by Google on Search engine results pages and on PageRank passing ability.

Nearly all major search engines use links as editorial votes given by choice to the website. If sites buy links to increase their standing on search engine results pages, websites that naturally attract links to rank are at a disadvantage.

It seems evident that Google is getting better at detecting paid links and penalising sites that publicly sell them.

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PageRank is the online currency, although not the only one, because there are still other search giants that don’t trade in PageRank. However, many webmasters and marketers vest much of their interests in that little green Rank-o-meter in the browser toolbar we all know so well.

Trends, it cannot be ignored, are there to be followed. It was once the place of every marketer to squeeze relevantly selected keywords into all the right slots, and that would be it. No cutting edge marketing campaigning needed - simply juicing the Meta elements would be enough get somewhere in the search engine results. Now it is different. Some years after the turn of the millennium, the goal posts have shifted so far back that your full efforts are usually not enough to rank a highly competitive page.

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It is always somewhat stressful to undertake a link building campaign for any given client, in that one needs approach each situation or industry from a completely fresh and unique angle, there is certainly an art to it. It’s not that one needs vast libraries of esoteric knowledge to attain the “perfect” web partnership (which wouldn’t hurt mind you), but rather that online business capitalism is nothing new and the getting a relatively small brand to rank (or a strong offline brand even) normally requires a good solid quantity of work hours. Constantly furthering the web presence of a site over an extended period is what it takes to climb the SERP ladder, as is true in the physical world as well. Get-rich-quick mentality does not apply to organic search engine optimization.

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PageRank (PR) is the method used by Google to rank web pages. This method “independently” weighs links to your site’s pages from other pages on the internet. If you have the Google Tool Bar you can access PR.

This is the heart of Goggles software, it is a system developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. PageRank plays a central role in many of Goggle’s web search tools.

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Anchor text is the wording used to represent an active link visually on a web page. This is something that should never be overlooked at webmasters, because neglecting it can land the sub-pages of your website in the supplemental results (less important pages) of search engines.

Search engines crawl the web constantly, following links to find and index information within web pages to later provide relevant resources for peoples many various searches. They Index pages that contain text related to topics, and due to the massive amount needed to be processed in a very short space of time, a link may not be considered should it contain no anchor text.

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If you ever browse through the online forums of WMW or even WPW, in the Link section you will always see countless questions on the value of recips, how many inbound links do i need, what links should i look for, are authority links better than 1000’s of normal links, etc…. the list is endless. The worst part, if that these questions are continually posted, with repeats.

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