An Epic Tale Of Google SEO And The Inbound Link by Matt Jackson
An Introduction To Google (For Those That Might Need It)
Google is the behemoth of search engines, the plateau we aspire to, and the
chagrin of many a Webmaster and marketer. If they love your website, you will
in turn grow to love the masses of traffic they send your way. In contrast, if
they deem your site to be of little or no value then you'll struggle to fill
the aching void in your Internet marketing. OK, so that might be a little over
the top but to the battle hardened SEO a lot of it will probably ring true and
they are certainly the biggest and most popular of the current search engines.
The Torrid Tale Of The Ever Changing Google Algorithm
Optimizing any site to promote it within Google search engine results pages can
prove to be an ongoing saga. After countless months of optimizing, tweaking,
linking, and improving you might be lucky enough to find your site listed at
the top of the results page. If you do then we all hail you and you have the
unarguable right to give yourself a firm pat on the back. Problems can arise,
though, when Google perform another of their seemingly uncountable algorithm
updates. Boom, your site suddenly drops from top spot to page 53 of the
results. After a week of crying, shouting, and screaming the results begin to
settle and your site once again finds itself heading towards the dizzy heights
of page one.
Again, this is a slight over-exaggeration in most cases. Google do update their
algorithms because they attempt to prevent the unethical few that we have all
come to know and love as black hat SEOs from gaining that coveted top spot. In
fairness to Google, this can't be an easy battle. They make a change, the black
hat SEOs change their methods to match. Google again make some changes in a bid
to counteract these new methods and, what do you know, the black hat SEOs pop
up again with some new, equally cunning ploy to steal the top positions from
the rest of us Google abiding promoters. And so, the algorithms change once
again.
An Introduction To Our Hero - The Inbound Link
However, since time immemorial Google has loved the inbound link in an almost
incestuous fashion. A quick browse through most result pages will throw up
results that you might find to be a freak or just completely wrong. Those sites
contain little or no mention of the keyword, or search phrase, in question and
yet they're appearing above your impeccably optimized page. Looking beyond the
search results and toward a link popularity tool you will inevitably find that
the site in question has an excellent link profile.
Why Use A Link Building Service To Fight Your Battles?
Google deem an inbound link as a tick, a gold star, and a big bag of brownie
points for your page. If that inbound link also contains the aforementioned
keywords as anchor text then you should expect great things in the future. If
you're looking for the single most important Google SEO factor then inbound
links are what you are looking for. The size of the tick or the amount of
brownie points that are found in your special bag are determined by just how
beneficial an inbound link is.
It's Not The Size Of Your Links...
Quality is, on the whole, much more important than quantity. Reciprocal links
were once the weapon of the Webmaster looking for Google acceptance, but they
now place less weight on a reciprocal link as they do on a one-way link. Google
want to promote a natural or organic Internet network. They don't want to see
links that have been traded, in any way, and instead want to see sites gifted a
link because of the value that they offer to visitors.
Google Battling Techniques
In reality, of course, gaining organic links is not a simple process. You need
to have traffic before you have any hope of gaining organic links and so it's
necessary to look elsewhere. The technique that I, as a Google battler, prefer
is the use of article submissions. This can be a submission to article
directories in the hope that every man and his site will pick it up, or
submission to individual high quality websites. It isn't important. What is
important is the degree of control that article submission offers.
Commanding A Regiment Of Inbound Links
Submitting an article makes me the boss, or General if you prefer, of my links
to an excellent extent and the search engines certainly don't seem to have a
problem with it (yet). I can control the page content, the anchor text, and in
the case of individual submissions I can control the quality (dare I say it -
PageRank) of the site or page that links to me.
Fighting On An Even Battlefield
Page content is important. Gaining a link from a page that is based on a topic
irrelevant to your own is near useless. Even ensuring that the text immediately
surrounding your link and the anchor text are relevant does not offer what I
look for in a linking page. I want complete (or as near as possible to
complete) relevancy.
Don't Camouflage Your Links
Control over anchor text is vital. The anchor text of a link is the visual
element that readers can see, it's the section of the HTML that is viewed and
clicked by readers, and it is the section of a link that many inexperienced
promoters get completely wrong. When you start a link building or article
submission campaign it is important to determine the keywords you will be
targeting and include these keywords in the hypertext of the link and
preferably at least once or twice in the article itself. Most article
directories allow for two links so use them both for different keywords,
preferably pointing to different pages of your site.
Always Be Planning Your Next Inbound Link Campaign
The final factor regarding linking that is vitally important is that you keep
going. Even when you reach the top spots for your most competitive keywords you
have to keep plugging away. The second you let it drop you can guarantee that
another site with another eager Webmaster at the helm is chomping at the bit
ready to take over the mantle of Google number one.
Only Fools Rush In
New websites should always take care not to build too many links too quickly.
Google do see this as meaning you employ an underhand method of link building
because new sites typically cannot muster up thousands of links in their first
few days. Take your time, submit one article to several directories, and then
wait to be indexed. Using this technique you will get indexed relatively
quickly and after a couple of weeks you can start to post articles with a
little more regularity.
Conclusion And A Little Ambush Prevention
Inbound linking is potentially (I use that word only to try and prevent the
ambush of criticism from others) the most important aspect of Google SEO. A
good link profile with a reasonable number of inbound links from high quality,
and relevant websites can make up for under optimized or even un-optimized
website content. What it can't make up for is the use of other black hat SEO
techniques. Do everything above board and it is less likely that you will
become one of the anti-Google druids; those that spend the rest of their online
life frequenting message boards and blogs relaying the tired tale of how they
were once an online millionaire before Google destroyed them.
About the Author
About The Governor
Matt Jackson is the website content copywriter
for WebWiseWords. As well as providing insightful tales of epic optimization
battles he also offers his unique
link building service to anyone that is even remotely interested and
several who aren't.
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