I swear my content is legitimate!

It’s freezing outside in Cape Town; the wind makes it even colder. That is why I find Shaun Anderson’s post about link juice so ironic at this point. He makes the analogy that linking to pages in a website is like shooting lasers at them and heating them up. The hotter pages are the ones with the most “lasers” pointing at them. As I peer out the window I imagine taking a bath in laser energy, even a nice fireplace would suffice

Silly as this sounds, it makes sense. Despite his post being dated almost a year old, the principles around link juice still apply. A combination of good onsite optimisation –meta tags, titles, URL names, keyword density and relevant keywords and information surrounding the main topical keywords in the copy, strategic, and hierarchically structured internal linking – and a handful of really good, relevant anchor text rich inbound links are undoubtedly a pathway to ranking and search engine traffic.

If there is one thing that I can take away from the search engine analysis industry, it’s that cheap tricks are not the way to get far commercially. You might fool a search engine at first, you might achieve a bout of good rankings, a spurt of traffic here and there, and maybe a few conversions, but the best way to success in the online world – same as offline – is to produce genuine content, where your primary goal is to actually give the visitor something a little more useful than they can get elsewhere, or to give them something that they cannot find anywhere else. .

Uniqueness, originality and idiosyncrasy ensure that your visitors are qualified, because they will more than likely have arrived at your site by looking specifically for what you offer. Innovation in what you present and how you present it will get you further, because if you offer what everyone else does, they will hop around your page and all the others like it. But if you add some special ingredients, they will spend most of that hopping time finding out what more they can get from you.

The wiki pages that occupy those first search results pages for informational queries may provide long drawn out explanations that encompass every aspect of a topic, and answer your question in an academic way, but you’re not always searching for that particular answer. Sometimes you want to be led down a path to something that will benefit you more. Invitation has a big place in website architecture and can be used to help people find value.

Some people might think that “salesy” writing is superficially superfluous rubbish that says more than is necessary to help visitors find what they need. If done excessively, this is definitely true. But, if you simply use this style to brighten up and make what you offer more “standoutish” and appealing, then you have done your job. There is balance in every approach.

Having laser beams heat up your pages is great, and the way to ensure greater trust and more natural inbound links is to be something that people really want to have or use. So please, all you adsense-blogspot-content-scraping-non-link-reciprocating-syndicators out there, just take down your spam sites. All you Joe Soap plumbers, corner shops and gardening services, sign up with Google local and get optimised for local search. Oh, and start a free blog and write to it every day.