Okay, so you understand that links are important, but how do you find them?

The first step to finding links is posting to relevant directories. Note the term ‘relevant’. This does not mean posting to every directory you can find, but posting to directories that a) potential customers may actually visit and b) have decent page ranks. Without a decent page rank, your link will be essentially useless.

One of the best ways to find relevant directories is to visit DMOZ, click on Reference, then click on Directories. From here, you can review the list of directories and determine which are relevant to your site.

When searching for relevant sites its easiest to ask for link exchanges. One way link building is far more difficult than two way, and if you have a resources page I recommend using it to gain link exchanges. Links posted on your resources page should not only help with link exchanges, but they should also be potentially useful to your customers.

One of the best ways to find link partners is to type ‘add url (keyword phrase)’ into a search engine. Results will list directories and potential partners. Also, just typing the keyword phrase into a search engine will list relevant sites. Visit the sites, determine if they have a resources page, and request a one way link. If they request an exchange, provide it for them. Remember, you should only be interested in having your link placed on a page with PR 3 or more (not the home page).

Link building can be an extensive process that takes tens if not hundreds of hours, and you may want to consider hiring professional SEO services to complete this task for you. Many SEO companies specialize in link building; however, before hiring any company you should ask these questions:

1) Do you submit to Search engines (a ‘yes’ is a clear sign of an incompetent SEO)

2) How many directories do you submit to (Anything above 50 is outrageous. Some would argue that anything above 5 is unnecessary.)

3) What type of sites will you get links from (you’re looking for relevant sites)

4) What page rank will these sites have (you’re looking for PR 3 or more, although I sometimes go down to PR 2)

Okay,

So now you’ve got your site ready to go: you’ve developed META information, created an excellent internal linking web, and written compelling and optimized SEO copy; however, you’re still missing a key component to Search Engine Optimization - External Links.

External links differ from internal links because they originate outside of your site.  Search engines view external links as a ‘vote’ for your site, meaning another website trusts yours enough to post a link to your site on theirs.  That means a lot to search engines, and the higher ranked the sites that link to you, the more credibility your site will have.

You hear a lot of SEO’s talking about the fabled .edu link, which allegedly performs SEO magic to your site.  It’s true that .edu links are highly regarded as link gold because .edu sites are considered the ‘most reliable’ of all sites on the internet, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to obtain the SEO links, as your site must generally benefit college students in some way, and few do.  So don’t spend too many hours searching for that link - chances are, unless you have a relevant site, you won’t find it.  .Org links come next in the heirarchy, followed by everything else (.com, .net, etc.). 

Essentially, there are two types of external links: one way links and reciprocal links.  A one-way link is a link comes from a site you do not link to, a reciprocal link comes from a site you do link to.  Reciprocal links are often part of an exchange, in which you promise to post a link in exchange for the posting of your own link on another site.  

While building links to your site you want to keep in mind that higher ranked pages are viewed as more credible in the eyes of search engines, and unindexed pages (pages that carry no page rank) are rarely viewed by search engines and carry little or no value.

I’ll discuss the process of obtaining links in the next post.

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly Professional SEO services, a Baltimore based Search Engine Optimization Company.

Once you’ve developed all your SEO friendly content it’s time to create some internal linking within your site (this may also be done as your writing your site’s content).

Internal Linking refers to any link contained on your site that points to another page on your site, and it is a good way to help users and search spiders navigate through your site.  Internal linking is is probably the best way to get relevant anchor text links pointing to your pages.

The main purpose of internal linking is to pass ‘link juice’ throughout your site.  Link juice refers to the amount of search engine recognition your site has.  Inbound links are like referrals from other webmasters, basically saying, “we trust this site enough to post a link on our site.”  As in life, the more referrals you have the more reliable your business will appear.  So, link juice is the search engine’s way of measuring your site’s reliability.

A superficial way to measure link juice is to check a page’s Page Rank.  To do so, you can download Google’s toolbar.  Pages with higher Page Ranks pass more link juice than those with lower page ranks.

Passing link juice from one page to another and developing an effective linking structure is truly an art, and the larger your site the more difficult the process becomes.   The general rule I follow is to add 2 or 3 internal links per page of copy.   These internal links should use specific anchor text link to refer to the page to which they are pointing.  For example, this link: professional seo services, leads to my website.  The text within the link, ‘professional seo services’, is the anchor text.  Since you’ve already optimized each page for SEO, you have two or three relevant keyword phrases for each page.  Use these phrases in your anchor text when linking to that page.

If you add new pages to your site and want to ‘juice’ them (get them indexed and ranked quickly), then you can add a link to that page on some of your higher ranking pages.  This will ensure that the page is crawled by spiders and indexed in search engines.

As an SEO specialist, I have an interest in many aspects of Social Media Optimization, and I recommend to each of my clients that they develop a blog. A blog serves several purposes, it provides your visitors with vital information regarding your industry, it helps establish your authority in a particular industry, it brings additional visitors to your site, and it helps you develop relevant anchor text links, which are vital for SEO.

To those interested in developing a Blog, I recommend using WordPress - of all do-it-yourself Blog services, WordPress seems to be the most SEO friendly and it is fairly straightforward.

Some important things to remember when developing your blog are: stick with relevant posts, write posts that visitors will find interesting, include 3-5 anchor text links (that is, after all, one of the purposes of your blog), and always include tags, which let Blog surfers know what your site is all about.

For professional SEO services, please visit our website. If you have any questions regarding this blog, feel free to post a comment.

A frequently used SEO phrase is “Content is King.”  This refers to the importance of good content on your site; after all, it doesn’t matter how many people you bring to your site through SEO tactics if none of them are willing to hear what you have to say.

It’s important to remember when developing your SEO content that the first rule is to develop user-friendly content that site visitors will actually want to read.

If you’re not a great writer, you may want to consider hiring a professional copywriter to develop your content.

General Rules for SEO content creation:

1)  Optimize for 2-3 keyword phrases, not just one.  Also, make sure you’re optimized for phrases, not single keywords.

2) Make sure you use the EXACT phrase numerous times in your writing.  If you’re optimizing for the phrase “used cars Denver” use the phrase “used cars Denver” as often as possible.  However, where the keyword phrase is inappropriate, you can use portions of the keyword phrase, such as “used”, “cars”, or “Denver”.

3)  Keyword densities should be between 3-5%.  Although some recommend higher density rates, over 5% density you run the risk of awkward, obviously SEO optimized content.  To check keyword density, try Webmaster Toolkit’s keyword density analyzer.

4)  When appropriate, include keyword phrases in H1 and H2 Coding.

Always keep your target audience in mind when writing your content, and write compelling material that moves visitors toward your goal, whether that be to sell a product or to provide services.

For professional seo services, please visit Dragonfly SEO.

In order to better organize your search engine optimization campaign, its a good idea to develop an extensive keyword phrase list that will serve as a foundation for the SEO process.

I prefer using Microsoft Excel.

Create Columns for the following information:

Keyword Phrase : Popularity : Competition : Priority : Optimized

Next, conduct your SEO keyword phrase research using Wordtracker or Trellian, and Google Adwords keyword phrase research. List any keyword phrases that are relevant for your website and fill in the subsequent columns.

Popularity: Searches that receive 50+ hits a day should be considered Highly popular, searches that receive between 10 and 50 hits a day should be considered Medium, and searches that receive 10 or less searches should be considered Low. For Google Adwords, develop an estimation based on the information provided.

Competition: Keyword phrases with 10,000 or more competing sites should be considered High, 100-10,000 should be considered Medium, 100 or less should be considered low.

Priority: Each keyword phrase should be assigned a rank from 1-4. Phrases with a rank of 1 should be bolded, these will be your main keyword phrases, for which you’ll want to optimize for throughout your campaign. These can be both universal terms (ie: used cars) and local, less competitive terms (such as: used cars maryland). You’ll have to use your intuition to determine which popular, highly competitive phrases you want to optimize for. In general, Phrases with High Popularity and Low competition, or Medium popularity and Low competition should be considered 1; however, you may want to develop your own system for ranking phrases. Remember, keyword phrases with a rank 1 are your most important, and will be optimized for during the first phase of your SEO development. Phrases with rank 2 will be optimized for during the second phase of your optimization, and so on and so forth.

Optimized: Save this spot for Y, meaning you have reached your search engine optimization for this particular keyword phrase. Also, you may want to include the date when you achieved your goal.

Before beginning any keyword research or link building for your site, its a good idea to familiarize yourself with a few SEO resources.

Plugins:

I use Firefox as my web browser and recommend that others do the same. Here are a few SEO friends Plugins I’ve picked up along the way:
Google Toolbar for Windows - Adds Google search box and other useful features to your toolbar.

Search Status - A great plugin that provides information regarding Page Rank and Alexa Rank.

SEO Quake - A comprehensive SEO plugin that features page rank, internal links, external links, and keyword density information.

SEO Tools:

Link Quality Tool - Good for determining the quality, not quantity, of links.

Webmaster Toolkit - A good all-in-one source for SEO tools

Useful SEO Resources:

Sphinn - An article discussion forum dedicated to SEO and SEM.

Search Engine Guide - Just as the name suggests.

SEO Moz - a great resource for SEO articles.

High Rankings Forum - Most answers to SEO questions can be found here.

Matt Cutts’ Blog - Google representative Matt Cutts’ Blog. A great place to find information regarding Google’s SEO changes.

Newsletters

High Rankings - a great weekly newsletter.

Bruce Clay, a major player in the internet marketing industry, also provides a great newsletter.

Also try Search Engine Land’s daily newsletter.

Don’t be frightened by the weird ‘techie’ name, although META Tags are part of HTML coding, they are easy to understand.

In the past, professional SEO services were primarily concerned with three aspects of the <head> portion of a website, these were: Title, keywords, and description. Now SEO is primarily concerned with only three: Title and description. Some claim that the keywords META tag has fallen out of favor on most search engines and will not help increase your site’s ranking. I tend to believe that its best to cover all your bases, and, assuming search engines still place some value on the keywords META, it can’t hurt your site to include keywords. Also, since SEO is in a constant state of flux, it’s possible the keywords META tag will one day be favored by Search Engines. Who knows.
The Title Tag

The title tag appears near the very top of your HTML code (generally within the first ten lines of code) and will look something like this: <title>Web Page Title</title> …that’s it. Naturally, you’ll want to change the ‘web page title’ portion to something that describes your web page. This will normally be the keyword phrase for which you are optimizing the page. So, if you intend to optimize the page for ‘used cars baltimore’ then input this title tag: <title>Used Cars Baltimore</title>, just make sure the Title describes what is actually on the page. That’s about it for the Title Tag.

META Keywords Tag

Here’s a sample keywords tag from a car dealer I did work for:

<meta name=“keywords” content=“ford dealer, ford vehicles, certified ford, St. Louis MO, Missouri, sunset ford, ford dealership, new car, used car, used truck, new truck used van, new van, new Ford, used Ford” />

The included keyword and keyword phrases are those phrases that Search Engine users may use when trying to find your site. DON’T include words that are not descriptive of your site, this is deceptive, and deception is never a good idea in SEO, as it leads to black hat tactics.

Keep these keywords in mind when writing your SEO copy and try to use each at least once.

META Description Tag

META tags are unnecessary for the overall coding of your site and most META tags serve no SEO purpose whatsoever. The META description tag, however, provides vital information to Search Engines and those who use them. The META description appears beneath a page link on SERPs (search engine results page). Let’s take ebay’s listing for example:

eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles …

((Buy and sell electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, digital cameras, and everything else on eBay, the world’s online … )) Stock quote for EBAY

www.ebay.com/ - 74k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

All text contained within the (( )) is called a snippet. If you don’t have a META description on your site, the snippet will be pulled from other sources, including the Open Directory Project (ODP), dmoz.org, or it will pull text directly from your content. A META description basically tells search engines what to place in this snippet. You should include the most important keyword phrases for your site; however, don’t stuff the description with so many keywords that it is unreadable. Try to make your description stand out in some way…this is your advertisement pitch to search engines users.

Some META descriptions convert better than others, so if you’re not getting the amount of visitors to your site, consider revising your description.

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO, an SEO company providing search engine optimization in Maryland and

Some aspects of keyword phrase research were covered in an earlier SEO article entitled Getting Started. I recommend reading that article before you read this one, as it provides a cursory introduction to Keyword Phrase research.

Because you’ve reached web page creation, a critical point in the development of your website, you should do what you’ll almost always do when you reach a new stage of SEO development — you’re going to conduct some keyword phrase research.

Keyword phrase research is the backbone of Search Engine Optimization because keyword phrases are one of the main criteria by which search engines determine a sites relevance. If, for instance, you sell cone shaped widgets and your website is www.cone-shaped-widgets.com and your copy is optimized for ‘cone shaped widgets’ and you have no competition, when somebody searches for ‘cone shaped widgets’ chances are your site will appear as #1 in the search engines results list.

NOTE: The results page that appears on a search engine after you’ve conducted a search is known as a Search Engine Results Page, or SERP. The goal of SEO is to get your site ranked as high as possible of SERPS for specific keyword phrases. This is discussed in more detail here.

The purpose of Keyword Phrase Research is to determine the best possible phrases for your site. The more appropriate the phrases, the more success you will have.

Researching Keyword Phrases

For this example we are going to utilize Wordtracker’s free keyword research tool.

Let’s say you have a used car dealership are just beginning your keyword research. Here are the results you receive when you search for ‘cars’.

According to the results, the term ‘cars’ has appeared in the Wordtracker database over 55,000 times in the past 90 days.

An easy, although cursory, method of determining the competitiveness of a keyword phrase is to search the term on Google (or any other Search Engine).

1) Shows the keyword search box. The searched term in this instance is ‘cars’.

2) (The aspect of the SERP we are concerned with) shows how many websites are concerned with the term ‘cars’ - 422 million. That’s a LOT of competition.

3) These are your organic results (non-paid)

4) These are your inorganic results (paid pay-per-click advertising, in this case Google Adwords)

So you’ve got 422 million competitors…you’ll probably want to optimize your site for a less competitive keyword phrase. Let’s utilize Wordtracker again, but lets try the phrase ‘used cars’, since you are setting up a site for a used car dealership.

Now we’ve got some manageable results. A Google results check shows that only 78 million sites list the term ‘used cars’. This is still a lot, so lets try to whiddle the competition down to a more reasonable number.

NOTE: This is a cursory method of determining your competition, as any site that just mentions ‘used cars’ will be calculated in the results list. Keep in mind that only approximately 25% or less of the results are truly competition.

Many beginning SEOs overlook an extremely importent aspect of SEO, optimizing for local, state, or region. If you only deal with a general area then you should optimize your site for that area. That way you’ll eliminate countless amounts of competition who do not serve your particular region.

Let’s say your used car dealership is in Baltimore. Search Wordtracker for the term ‘baltimore used cars’.

In the past 90 days, ‘baltimore used cars’ has been searched 28 times. NOTE: This only accounts for Wordtracker’s database (which gets select results from Search Engines). I recommend using these numbers as percentage estimates, meaning a term with 50 results will most likely be searched for twice as many times as a term with 25 results.

While you may think to yourself, “approximately 16000 people are searching for the phrase ‘used cars’ in a 90 day period, there’s no way I’m not going to optimize for that phrase, especially if I’m optimizing for ‘baltimore used cars’, which is only searched 28 times.” This type of thinking does in many beginning SEOs. You ARE optimizing for the phrase ‘used cars’ because it is part of ‘baltimore used cars‘. However, at this point in your site development you are concerned with starting small and targeting specific, less competitive phrases. After you’ve created a web presence, you can go after the big dogs.

Make a List of 10-20 keyword phrases that are relevant to your site (this will take some time) Stay focused, don’t stray from the topic of your website, even if it seems like a good idea.

NOTE: The order of words DOES matter, so play around with word orders and test them with Wordtracker.

Here is a sample list:

baltimore used cars

used cars for sale in baltimore md

used cars maryland

used cars in baltimore (NOTE: If two terms are similar and separated only by ‘in’ or ‘and’, go with the term that is searched more frequently. Also, if one term is PART of another term (ie. used cars for sale and used cars for sale in baltimore md), use the phrase that includes both terms)

used car dealerships in maryland

NOTE: If you deal with specific brands of cars, list them as well - ie - used ford baltimore

The Tool found here is useful for determining the competitiveness of a keyword phrase:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/Now you should have a decent list of keyword phrases, which you will use throughout the creation of your Search Engine Optimized website.

Before you write your SEO copy and after you’ve conducted your keyword phrase research it is a good idea to develop the basic framework for your site. This will help you stay organized and also help you to avoid confusion during the process of internal linking (creating text links that link to other pages within your site). Internal linking is beneficial for SEO and it also adds flow to your website.

Write a preliminary site map (list of pages that will appear on your website). Generally, websites include the following pages:

1) Home

2-7) Product Services Page(s) (list specific pages)

8 ) About Us

9) Contact Us

10) Links

When developing your internal linking structure, you should be primarily concerned with the Home and Product / Services pages — these will be the meat and potatoes of your site and an important aspect of you SEO internet marketing campaign.

Assign a number to each page (as listed above).

Developing a Linking Structure

I find it easiest to create a numerical list of 3-5 pages to link to from your home page and each product / service page. So, utilizing the numbers that you have already assigned to each page, develop your structure in this manner:

1) Home - 2, 5, 7 ,9

2) Product #1 - 1, 9, 6, 4, 8

Etc.

Spread out your linking campaign so that no page has a weighted amount of internal links. Save this list for later.