All Entries in the "Link Building" Category
Response to Allen Taylor’s Response to Michael Martinez Post on SEO Theory :)
Allen Taylor posted a response to Michael Martinez’ post on SEO Theory and I decided to expand on that response here.
Image via Wikipedia
Content VS Link Building
Content is king. Links only support content, they are not more important than content, never were, never will be. Left you see Google’s home page from 1998. Content was king then and still is today.
Title Tags
Title tag for a web page should be the key phrase you are targeting for ranking that page IF the title also makes someone want to click it.
Description Tag
You should write your own description tag. If you have a header tag on the page that is or contains a key phrase you are targeting and you want google to use the description in the paragraph on the page below that header, then don’t use that key phrase in your description.
If you write your own description tag and you rank for a particular phrase that IS in the description, google will use your description. If google does NOT find that phrase in the description, it will use what’s on the page. So you can use google snippets to pull content for some phrases while keeping your own description for other phrases.
Keywords
Not doing keyword research and not using keywords in your pages is moronic. No other way to put it. That does NOT mean using the key phrase you want to rank for over and over again. It’s all about semantics.
Your key phrase in the title tag and in the header tags on the page basically tells the googlebot what you’d LIKE to rank for. The bot will then search the content for other keywords it expects to find on a page that is really about that topic. If it finds those related words, you have a chance to rank well. Pretty simple.
Link Building
As far as building links goes, building a lot of links from anywhere you can get them, using the same anchor text for most if not all of them, and pointing them all to your home page is a total waste of time.
Google isn’t stupid. They aren’t going to believe that suddenly 1000 people linked to you and all of them underlined and linked the exact same words to describe your site and all of them linked to the exact same page.
You don’t need a ton of links. You need links from high-traffic websites that are related to your topic. You promote content, you don’t just build links.
Building knol pages, hub pages, squidoo lenses, posting an article in a related forum if they allow it, these are things that are good for building high-quality links. But it has to be 100% original content and it has to be interesting and it has to be helpful to people.
Those are the reasons you get click-thrus from those articles. It isn’t about the links. it’s about getting people to read the content and want to come to your website. The fact that you are also link building and feeding the algorithm is a side benefit, not the purpose of real article marketing.
Keyword Domains
Image via CrunchBase
Yes, the keywords in the domain name do help you rank well in search engines. Sorry, but it’s a fact, not a theory.
Just search for SEO on Google. SEO.com is #1. According to Michael’s theory, this makes the people at SEO.com better at SEO than anyone else on the web . . . or another theory is . . . they own SEO.com. I’ll say the latter is correct, not to say anything bad about the people at SEO.com, but the best in the world at SEO? Seriously? They were smart enough to get SEO.com though. Gotta give em that.
With searches for most keywords, you will find that keyword in the URL, not necessarily the domain name itself, like wikipedia.com/keyword. Having the keywords in your domain name is not enough. Other factors are at play here like the actual content on the page.
You can overcome not having the keywords in your domain name, but the key word in this sentence is “overcome”. Why handicap yourself and “overcome” not having the keyword in your domain name? It is an advantage and every little thing you can do to gain an advantage is a good thing. It’s why we still use alt tags, header tags and other things. Any one of those by themselves is not that important. But if you do them all, it adds up.
If you own a company, you should own the domain that matches your company name. You use that on biz cards, letterhead, ads, etc. You brand that name. But your website can be physically located on a domain name that matches the product you sell or the service you provide or the key phrase that brings you the most traffic.
Your “company domain name” is simply pointed to or redirected to that keyword domain so the people who see your ads, biz cards, letterhead and such will still arrive at the right place. In the search engine results pages, people click links and don’t care what the domain name is. It can even help you track what is happening because of your seo efforts vs what is happening because of your marketing efforts.
Anyway, there is so much misinformation out there, I thought I’d straighten some of it out. Need 100% original Content written for you? Let us optimize your web pages the right way. Call us at 512.322.9566 for a free SEO consultation.
