Backlinks inevitably come up in every discussion of SEO. They are a critical part of building solid traffic and play a large role in getting your website ranked by search engines. Building good backlinks can take a lot of time. Unique IP addresses are very important, so you can’t just set up a bunch of domains and link to yourself and get results. The ranking of the sites linking in is also important. The more authoritative the site linking to you, the better your site looks to Google. In a perfect world, content really would be king. Unfortunately, with billions of websites out there, learning how to use the system is an important element for success.

Buying Backlinks

Buying backlinks from an SEO company can be very effective very quickly but the ground you gain usually doesn’t last long. Since many backlink packages include software you run on your server, you risk damaging your site’s reputation and getting your IP blocked for spamming. Buying backlinks one-by-one can be very effective if you have a decent budget and are willing to spend time researching each site before you invest. It’s rather like advertising but with the search engine as the consumer.

Building Backlinks Yourself

The organic backlink is the most powerful of all. Good content, well distributed WILL grow your traffic though, of course, it takes both work and time. Trading links is a great way to grow traffic while supporting other businesses and growing your network. Great methods for building backlinks on your own include: posting on blogs, posting on forums, posting on article directories, utilizing social bookmarking sites and newsletters.

I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, the secret to success is hard work. As much as we all might not want to admit it, the quick fix or the magic bullet are just as pretend on the Internet as they are in the real world. The great thing about investing time and energy into building up backlinks is that, in the process, you’re also improving your brand and building your networks. The more good content you put out there, the more attention you get. And I just can’t ever say enough for good old fashioned reputation. Behind every computer (kind of) there is a person, with a real live brain, forming opinions about every single thing he sees. If your company keeps popping up with compelling content he wants to read, you’ll get his clicks, and his links, and his network.

In the last post we discussed the new changes in Google’s algorithm to favor older, faster sites. But what does that mean for you?  Well, as is always the case with Google’s changes, there are many ways you can optimize your site to take advantage of the new rules.

In addition to older, faster favoritism, Google is now a faster spider. GoogleBot is more robust, and can spider more information more quickly. This means, of course, that new content is more important than ever before. It also means newer products will likely appear in searches before older ones. This can present some problems but, overall, just remember: New=indexed.

Over the past few days, I have been researching what site changes need to be implemented to get TurnKey Internet to the top. I have learned that there are several changes that can improve rank under the new algorithm, though not all of them are easy or without some technical trickiness.  While reading over these suggestions, remember, the goal here is to maximize speed and take advantage of faster indexing. Of course, you also want to continue to add new content, but you already know that.

Make the most of Google Caffeine

1) Minimize CSS and Javascripts

This is pretty obvious but, by reducing file size, you can significantly increase your site speed.

2) Avoid Duplicate URLs

If you’re pulling the same content, there is no need to be duplicating the same URL. Each time the browser loads that content, it slows download speed.

3) Intelligently Paralyze Resource URLs

Use separate host names for all of your files—for example, CSS.yourdomain.com or images.yourdomain.com. By doing this you allow your browser to make simultaneous connections, increasing site download speed. But watch out for your javascript files. These need to be in the same location as your index file because many browsers won’t start rendering until the javascripts have executed.

4) Enable Compression

Enable mod_gzip or mod_decompress to, once again, speed up your site download.

5) Enable Caching

Make sure you have enabled caching and “last modified” tags to reflect updates. Make them available to search engines with HTTP headers.

6) Use a CDN for Graphic Intensive Sites

Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host large images and other files. This will cache these files geographically. What you spend on CDN (which shouldn’t be much) should pay for itself with increased business from improved page rank.

While PageRank remains shrouded in mystery, each new update reveals new information we can all use to optimize our content. Remember, like with all legitimate hard work, improving rank takes time. But if you make these improvements now, you will be ahead of the curve and, with a little luck and some elbow grease, you can rise to the top of search results.

To your success!

As the latest round of Google’s algorithm changes take the Internet by storm, SEO marketers around the world are wondering what effect these changes will have on search results. Google’s primary metric, PageRank, named after its inventor, Larry Page, is extremely complex. The Wikipedia entry for PageRank demonstrates the lengths to which many great minds have gone to try and reverse-engineer the algorithm to figure it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank.  But, each new algorithm tweak Google reveals new hints about how it all works.

The latest update is called Caffeine and includes several new layers of complexity for the algorithm. It is rumored that caffeine will be taking into account website age and loading time. This will benefit those sites that are more established and faster, and will hurt newer and slower sites. Evidently, Google aims to reinforce good quality, reliable content, optimized for speed and built over time. This is consistent with Google’s mission of improving the overall search experience.

According to Wikipedia and Mashable, there are two key changes to consider:

1) Caffeine includes a massive speed increase. Search results will now be returned twice as fast as before.

2) Search results will be “blended,” including information culled from a wide variety of sources—press releases, images, video, news—along with traditional results.

While, as a marketer Google’s constant changes might drive me crazy, as a searcher, I appreciate the egalitarian nature of much of what they do. If marketers had the inside scoop, there would, undoubtedly, be millions of dollars invested by those who could afford it to manipulate search results to their own ends. This would be great for those businesses but, in the long run, it would ruin the user experience. When I run a search, I’m not looking for results paid for by wealthy companies, I’m looking results that best match my search terms. As our collective information bank, our massive online reference library, Google has a responsibility to the information above all else. As much as the business people among us might wish for it, as soon as money starts getting in the way of our free access to information, we no longer live in a free society.

Google has recently designed a new way to stalk, I mean, ‘stay connected,’ with friends, family and acquaintances.  It’s called Google Buzz.  This social networking tool is essentially a Twitter and Facebook status hybrid.  Much like Twitter, you can ‘follow’ your friends and update your Google Buzz update with what you are thinking.  It has also incorporated two Facebook status features – the ability to ‘like’ an update and the ability to comment directly to the person.  The latter point is an especially important feature.  My biggest complaint with Twitter is that it’s not only hard to follow a conversation, but also, if someone does reply, Twitter does not notify you.  Google Buzz takes care of both of these problems.  In addition, Google has integrated YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and Google Reader to make it easier for its users to share interesting links, videos, and pictures.

When Google Buzz was introduced, it faced a lot of harsh criticism.  Many complained that it was adding ‘more noise into an already buzzing area of my life.’  A Harvard Law School student filed a class action suit against Google, claiming Buzz violated many privacy laws.  Since then, Google has taken many measures to further protect the privacy of its clients.  The negative ‘buzz’ surrounding Google Buzz has simmered down also.

Along with our Twitter and Facebook profiles, Turnkey Internet has created a Google Buzz account.  Please follow us at ‘TurnkeyInternetinc’ on Buzz to stay on top of breaking news, updates, and specials for our company.

With SEO, there are innumerable factors that contribute to your page rank, and keeping on top of them is the only way to make sure you’re doing all you can to optimize your website. One critical and often overlooked angle to investigate when it comes to SEO, is your web host.

Server Reliability

It may seem obvious, but uptime is one of the fundamental aspects of your hosting experience that will effect your site rank. Search engine spiders are unpredictable and could be crawling your website at any time. If your site is down when they stop by, you’re not getting indexed. All of your hard work means nothing if your site is m.i.a when it matters most. As a quick aside, I would like to mention that TurnKey Internet offers 100% uptime

Robot Text

Robot text is another important factor for SEO that is often overlooked. Robot text is a document that tells your server how to deal with search engine crawlers. Make sure your host has the document set to allow crawlers, otherwise you won’t be indexed.

IP Address Reputability

Another SEO factor you should consider when researching a new web host is your IP address. With some hosting plans you have your own address, while with others you share an IP. Sharing an IP address brings with it a substantial risk. Search engines penalize IP addresses that are linked to non-reputable sites, and, if you happen to be sharing one of these penalized IP’s, it can dramatically affect your SEO. If SEO really matters to you (and if you have any kind of online business, it should) the safest bet is to talk to your hosting provider about purchasing your own dedicated IP.

I don’t know about you but I’m getting kind of sick of SEO. Obviously it’s an incredibly important thing to know about when it comes to marketing. Getting your website to come up on searches is probably the single most important element for fiscal success. But how possible is it for one person to make that happen? Are SEO techniques really that helpful and, if so, why do they seem like such a mystery? And then, of course, there is the topic every discussion of SEO must inevitably broach: what of that slippery Google algorithm that seems to change every other week?

If I got paid for every clown who claims to have THAT figured out, I’d be a very rich woman.

Steeped in mystery, Google’s algorithms determine, based on nobody really knows what, which sites rise to the top of searches and which sites disappear into obscurity. And of course, just as they claim to understand the algorithm, thousands upon thousands of professionals claim to be able to help you “optimize your SEO” within it—to crack the enigma code anew, just for you, for $39.95. Surely there are plenty of legitimate professionals who really do have some idea of how to use this system. They are the real experts. You can find them wherever the big bucks are sold.

For the rest of us trying to make it, what do we do? Who do we trust? How can the individual marketer sift through the malarkey and find the real SEO tips and tricks that will improve page rank? Well, for a one-time payment of $39.95…

Just kidding.

In my experience, if you’re willing to put in the time, to experiment with all of the various techniques on all of the various blogs, it *is* possible to improve your rank. It won’t happen immediately. You won’t be number one on the Internet, but you WILL improve and that improvement can be significant. Here are the four tricks, courtesy of real live SEO expert Cal Hesson over on hostingdiscussion.com, that have helped me get TurnKey Internet higher up in the charts:

(1) Keyword Phrase Research and Analysis

Identify the keyword phrases that people are using to find your products and services. This can be done in several ways, many of which cost money. There are, however, lots of tools that are free or relatively inexpensive, that can fill you in on your analytics. Google Analytics is one that many swear by. Here at TurnKey we already had an analytics tool installed on our servers. I used that.

(2) Study the Competition

Pay close attention to who holds the top 10 positions for the keyword phrases you want to target. You need to look at your competitions On-Page SEO (the text and content of their pages) and their Off-page SEO (the inbound links, etc., that contribute to site ranking). Part of the Off-page SEO analysis is counting the back links to your competitor’s web sites. You’ll have to either get more or better back links than they have.

(3) Good On-Page SEO

You need to pay very close attention to the titles, keywords, descriptions, body content, etc., of your site. The search engines have to really understand what your web site is all about, and good, editorially sound content provides that. The good news is: you have complete control over this content.

(4) Back Links

As the title implies, for a good SEO profile, good back links are essential. There are myriad ways of getting back links, although understanding what good back links are has become more difficult as Google continually changes how they are valued.

There you have it: a quick and dirty set of simple tips for improving your site ranking. Sure, there are trade secrets to SEO and, if you really want them, I’m sure you can find someone who will take your money. Barring that, why not do what I do? Dedicate yourself to the process, take the time, follow these rules, read all you can and figure out those secrets for yourself. To your success!