Most articles written about SEO (including my own) tend to point to one important factor: incoming links. Links, links, links! All you need is links! Easy, but how do you get them? There are hundreds of techniques for link building; none are particularly easy, most are time consuming and some are tedious and unrewarding.

Manual link building

One of the most tedious and unrewarding ways (and also the most common) is picking through websites by hand, finding the ones with good PageRank, removing those that are in competition with you, and emailing them. Yawn.

Manual link building services

There are many companies out there that offer to do this for you. One company, Content Now, offer 500 link solicitations for £150.

That figure instantly raises 2 questions to my mind, reading their FAQ’s I find the answers:

Q. What does “number of solicitations” mean?
A. The number of solicitations refers to the number of email requests we will send out on a monthly basis on your behalf.

Q. What is your average conversion rate from solicitations to actual links gained?
A. On average it is between 2% and 4%. It tends to vary due to the sector and the quality of the client’s website.

2-4% = 10-20 links = £25-£50 per link

Bear in mind however, that these are reciprocal links, and so aren’t worth as much in the eyes of the search engines.

Link bait

Another method link building is link bait. Link baiting is where you write an article to attract links, whether that is a resource, a useful guide, something funny etc. If successful, people consider this link bait important enough to post on their blog, social bookmark etc. and this builds links.

Link bait service

A company offering a link bait service is The SEO Company. Their website highlights one success story where one article “now has over 600 links, around 30-40 of these are true editorial votes“. The SEO Company charge £999 per linkbait article.

600 links costing £999 = £1.665 per link

These links are one-way links, which are more important to SEO. The 30-40 editorial votes are likely to drive far higher quality traffic than link requests shotgunned out to webmasters, who paste them anonymously into link pages. Do however, bear in mind that this is a success story, so your actual link volumes may be less.

Paid links

In it bid to prevent manipulation of the organic search results, Google announced in 2007 that:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

As such the buying of links that pass PageRank is not recommended. There are even tools for reporting paid links and Matt Cutts (Software engineer at Google) posts some great information on his blog about how and why paid links should be reported.

Valuation of paid links

Even though paid links are frowned upon, they still happen. There’s only so much an automated system can find (assisted by the anti-spam team at Google, and those reports submitted via Webmaster Tools), so if you’re careful where and how you buy, the is some (albeit risky) value to buying links.

So how much is a paid link worth? There are a handful of Link Valuation tools around, which take into consideration factors such as number of Backlinks, Alexa traffic rank, age of the website, etc:

• SEO Chat Link Price Tool
  
• Link Lift Tool

Although the valuations can differ massively, they do give a good relative idea if you have a yard stick to compare against.

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Just a small tip for today; I picked this one up whilst skim-reading a bunch of RRS feeds. Whilst it wasn’t intended for this purpose where I read it, it’s a handy little tip that can be used to expand your vocabulary when writing for SEO.

When copywriting with the Search Engines in mind, it is easy to fall into the trap of repeating the same keywords over and over, shoehorning them awkwardly into sentences, resulting in copy that doesn’t read well at all.

Any good professional copywriter should (hopefully) be able to integrate a plethora of keywords into beautifully crafted paragraphs, however, for the rest of us who write our own here’s a little tip:

Find related terms using the tilde or synonym operator (~)

For example, you are writing copy about mortgages and have a quick brainstorm on what to include in your SEO copy: ummm….mortgages, mortgage, home loan….ummm….umm…

OK, let’s hit Google with the search term:

~mortgages -mortgages

This effectively means:

1. search for everything related to mortgages (~mortgages)
2. but remove mortgages from the result (-mortgages)

Now take a look what comes back, my vocabulary suddenly expands to:

• mortgage
• mortgages
• loans
• home loans
• credit cards
• personal loans
• unsecured loans
• home equity loans

All of these terms Google will consider relevant to “mortages“, and are well worth including in your copy when your sentence hits a dead end.

There are thousands (millions?) of blog and web pages out there telling the world what SEO is. I thought it may be interesting to do a bit of research (with Google’s help) into what the world thinks SEO is not.

1. SEO Is Not An Option, It’s A Requirement!

   Jill Whalen at searchengineland.com looks at how SEO is delivered when a client employs a design agency to build a new website.

   “Some website designers mention SEO as part of their services, either built into the design or as an add-on, but there’s often not a lot of detail describing exactly what sort of SEO services are offered. Other designers or agencies never mention SEO at all. It’s doubtful that a small-business owner having their first website designed would know what SEO is, let alone have the knowledge to ask for it.”

   http://searchengineland.com/071220-071548.php

2. SEO Is Not Free Traffic

   Stephan Spencer at searchengineland.com explains how SEO is all about time & expertise, and just like any other industry, they certainly aren’t free! He also points out that SEO is an ongoing task, not just a one-off hit (see number 4 also).

   “One of the first jobs I have to do as a consultant going into an SEO engagement is to debunk the myth that SEO is “free.” SEO has never been, nor will it ever be, free traffic. It takes work, and that comes at a cost.”

   http://searchengineland.com/080417-114400.php

3. Web Accessibility is not SEO

   “There are numerous articles pointing out the business advantages of accessibility. Many of these reflect the similarity between accessibility and SEO. However, despite the close technical relationship between the needs of disabled users and the technical requirements of search engine optimization, the fact remains that the two goals are not the same, are not equivalent, and do not reflect the same ultimate goals.”

   http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2008/07/web-accessibility-is-not-seo/

4. SEO Is Not a One-Time Fix

   Chris Boggs of Search Engine Watch very correctly points out that SEO is not about quick fixes, but more about long-term relationships. He suggests that any SEO contract should be 3 years, minimum. Gulp!

   “SEO should be a lifelong engagement for any site. It’s unlikely that many “real” SEOs will disagree with this statement, but there are people who feel this is a one-time fix. That theory couldn’t be further from the truth.”

   http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3630274

5. SEO Is Not An Argument

   Hmmm…maybe not, but it looks like there could be an agruement over SEO if you got Seth Godin and the anonymous author from V7 Network in a room together!

   “I love Godin’s stuff, but he can talk some gibberish, at times.”

   http://blog.v7n.com/2007/08/20/seo-is-not-an-argument/

6. SEO Is Not Set And Forget

   I see a running theme here, are we getting the point yet? :P
   “SEO is a not a set and forget business. One of the most important components of any business model and that includes search engine optimization, is a process of review.”

   http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/

7. SEO is not an Advertising Campaign but an Advertising Process

   “SEO is not an advertising model but a process of consistent tweaking and monitoring to get your website to rank high on organic search engine result page (SERP)”

   http://www.webdesign.org/

8. SEO isn’t rocket science.

   Very true, whereas good SEO is quite difficult to get your head around, rocket science is incredibly difficult. SEO doesn’t need a master’s degree or a doctorate. You don’t kill astronauts when your SEO projects go wrong either.

   http://www.dmnews.com/

9. SEO is not a black art

   A quick rant over at the RedEvolution blog leaves us with 3 key points, but I reckon that there’s just one that stand out to me as being all important: “Create content people need and will want to link to“. Get that right, and you’ve won the battle (mostly!).

   http://seo.redevolution.com/seo-is-not-a-fg-black-art/

Whilst this blog isn’t really about hosting, hosting is something all website owners need to consider.

This website is currently hosted with 1&1 and to date, I have been very happy with the service I have received. Above all, it works out very cost effective for someone with my needs where I host many domains with small websites receiving minimal traffic. There is not additional cost for hosting 1 website or 100 websites (apart from the domain name itself.)

After reading some terrible reports on 1&1’s customer service department, I have started to look around. One of the companies I have considered is United Hosting. They are a UK company, hosting in UK data centers with some good write-ups around the web, some of which are re-published on the United website.

There are many factors to consider when choosing a hosting company and uptime is only one of them, however I thought I would publish these stats I have found using a free trial of the Pingdom server monitoring service, monitoring servers found on United Hosting’s status page :

I was quite happy to move my business to United Hosting, however that amount of downtime is unacceptable to me. The search continues….

(SEO is in everything you do, pt1)

Search engine optimisation involves many factors; links, keywords, competition, page rank, all of which will be covered in this blog in time. In part one of the “SEO is in everything you do” series, I look at how, if you think like a searcher from the very start, you will gain an advantage without even trying.

Think like a searcher? What do you mean?

If you’re going to rank for the things that people search for, you have to do it in their language. As the internet grows, searchers have become more web-savvy. Gone are the days when people would fire up Alta-vista or Yahoo and search for ‘Watches’, ‘Clothing’ or ‘Shoes.’ People have learnt that this returns a lot of irrelevant results. Nowadays people search for much more specific terms; they fire up Google and tap much more specific phrases such as ‘Buy watches online’ ‘Ladies clothing shops in Manchester’ or ‘Men’s leather golf shoes oxford’. When it comes to making a decision on how to word things relating to your business, both online and offline, you need to think like a searcher too.

SEO in your business name

SEO can start right from the beginning. If you’re lucky enough to be taking up the challenge of starting a new business, consider what impact your business name and strap line may have on your search performance. If Keith, Tom and Mike were to start an IT business installing networks for B2B clients, they could name it:

“KTM Networks”

However I would bet not many people would find them in the search results, unless specifically searching for the business by name. Now, thinking like a searcher, how about:

“KTM Network Installations - Installing IT networks for your business”

Instantly, without trying, you’re including relevant keywords and phrases that people might search for:

• Network installations
• Installing networks
• IT networks
• IT network installations
• Business network installations

Also, as a side bonus, the keywords for your business sector are automatically included in the text of every natural inbound link you receive. For those who may not be so familiar with SEO factors, SEOMoz considered the text of an inbound link to be of ‘exceptional importance’ on the SEO scale, stating that “Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person [or search engine] can make about what your site/page is ‘about’“.