Backlinking Doesn't Work

This will be a short post, and hopefully useful. I just finished reading a report by Chris Munch.  It was informative and made a lot of sense. This year, I committing to building out my online business.  I'm committing to giving up my regular job and working exclusively on the internet.

The learning curve is high and one of the things I'm learning about is backlinking and its importance to getting good rankings on the search engines.  In 2011 there were big changes that effected a lot of internet marketers.  Sites that were on top of the search engines, disappeared over night.

Things changed!

And things will continue to change.  What is effective now with backlinks will probably not continue to be effective, so as an internet marketer you have to stay ahead of the curve.  If you only have one strategy for developing your sites, your in trouble.

Link exchange used to be a popular way to get rankings. But once the search engines caught on, then it could hurt your site.  The more people use the same strategy the quicker it will stop working. 

Over and over, I've read that content is king. And Google agrees,
“The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making
any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page's visitors?"

When building your site consider how you're building your backlinks.  Do it in a natural way.  Take your time and build thoughtfully.

Your content should be useful and on topic.  If you use a technique like exchanging links, make sure it makes sense for your site.  The links you have pointing back to your site should be relevant. Search engines, Google, looks at relevance. 

Remember that it's about the value you add to your visitor, client, etc.  that counts.  More value = more profit.

That's a good thing.

Stephen

On Site SEO

I just got off a webinar that was giving some basics on SEO - search engine optimization.  Some simple things to consider when you're building your site are keywords, title tags, META tags, and interior linking.

Keywords:
The webinar host said that the description is more important than the keywords you choose, but you still have to use your keywords in the description, so the keywords are still important.  You don't have to choose a lot of keywords. Two or three keywords is enough.  Make sure to use them in your description of the site and that you use them in the body of the text of your page at least once per paragraph, better every 2 or 3 sentences.

Example: TonyHortons10MinuteWorkout.com
Keywords: Tony Horton's 10 Minute Workout/Tony Horton's 10 Minute Trainer/Tony Horton
Notice the number of times the keywords appear in the text.  Also the main keyword is also the domain name.

Title Tags
That's the tag that appears on top of the browser window. The tag for this blog is Internet Marketing Strategies.  In the example, the Title is Tony Horton's 10 Minute Workout. Worth The Money!

Meta Tags:
These are basically your keywords. Again you're choosing 2 to 3 keywords. 

Interior Linking:
If you have more than one page for  your site, you need to make sure that you can navigate to the other pages. 

There's a lot more to talk about and I'll be posting more about on and off-site SEO in later post, so keep your eyes open.