Well okay, we have to admit that it isn’t easy to achieve top search engine rankings, but it may be easier than you think. The key is to understand contextual linking and to tailor your keyword phrases a bit. Greed is the enemy of page rank – everyone in the mortgage industry may want to be one of the top five in Google search for mortgages, but you’re facing some stiff competition considering how many millions of mortgage lenders there are. The competition can be fierce and expensive.

The key to a top search engine ranking is diversifying your keywords a bit to cover several niche markets within the overall market. For instance, you may not be able to be number one for “mortgages,” but you could certainly be in the top five for “Arizona FHA loans,” “Pennsylvania home equity loans,” or “best CA mortgage rates” if you focus on 3-5 word phrases (the long tail) rather than one catch-all keyword like “mortgages.”

Hitting Once vs. Hitting Many Times

The results can be phenomenal. In this case, most people are searching for a mortgage lender that can work with them specifically and can address their situation, so most searchers are going to narrow the focus of their search according to their own needs, which could be by state, type of loan, bank affiliation, etc. If you’ve done your homework and can come up with several combinations of words or phrases to combine with the word “mortgage,” you will soon find yourself with top search engine ranking on the first page of Google searches for many niche searches. If you can’t be in the top five for "mortgages", wouldn’t it be great to be in the top five for twenty different kinds of specific mortgage or mortgage services in twenty different states?

Contextual Links can Get you Top Search Engine Rankings

Contextual links on your site will help you rank well with the search engines if you have these links set up for each of the exact 3-5 keyword phrases that you are trying to rank high on search pages. Remember, contextual links are considered Primary Text by the search engines. Placing your contextual links “above the fold,” or in the top half (or better yet, top quarter) of each page they appear on strengthens their importance for search engine purposes.

An even better use of contextual links is to make sure your exact keyword phrases are used as links back to your site from other websites. There are several ways to achieve this, including reciprocal links on sites that are relevant to your own site but not competitive with it (for mortgages, you might want links from sites that offer real estate services, credit cards or credit counseling, home improvement information, payment calculators….the variations are endless). Better yet, have your keyword phrases appear within relevant articles or blog posts. Readers are sure to notice these links and these kinds of dynamic links will definitely get the attention of search engines.

To maintain your top search engine ranking in niche areas, periodically update, rewrite and add to the information and links you have for each of your 3-5 keyword phrases. If you’ve ranked on the first search page for twenty different phrases, you can rotate through these and update five or so phrases each month when you’re in a time crunch and can’t work on all twenty. The beauty of this is that, even if a few of your phrases slip down in the rankings, you still have other phrases that are performing well and keeping you in the top search engine rankings. Done right, a variety of specific, niche keyword phrases will keep you in the top of the search engine rankings with great consistency.

[tags] top search engine rankings, contextual links, keyword research, reciprocal links, niche markets [/tags]

Please Share This:

You may have tried link building campaigns in the past and been disappointed in the results. Perhaps you got barely a blip in the major search engines or you saw your rank rise only to fall a few months later. Whatever the reasons for your disappointment, it’s a good bet that the main reason you were disappointed in the results is that whatever link building tactics you used or paid for lacked two important qualities: balance and consistency.

The Importance of Balance in Link Building

Some people advocate the importance of content-rich websites, others focus on blogs and still others will insist that directories are the most important link building campaign features. The truth is never as simple as some people try to make it. It can seem like blogs are the place to link one month, and then be out of fashion just a few months later, with forums replacing them as the Holy Grail for link building.

The truth is, all of the many places you can link to and from (with the exception of unsavory linking sites that are tantamount to spam) are important to provide you a balance of coverage in your link building campaigns. Search engines are constantly changing, growing and evolving. They become more complex, develop new algorithms and morph so that you can’t ever keep up with how they are weighing the relative importance of any one kind of link, so you shouldn’t even try.

The solution is to balance your link building strategies for the greatest possible coverage over a multitude of formats. If you do this, you’ll find that you are always hitting on multiple cylinders. Although you might not be getting great results from every single link strategy, you’ll be getting pretty good ranking from several of them. It’s like playing a good point spread – coverage is key.

A good link building campaign with optimal coverage will include all of these:
• Directories with real editors. Well-known directories that are always updating and actually review the links are a hot destination for many industries.
• Forums. Links to your site from various forums provide dynamic attention for you – forums are the equivalent of the water cooler – the site where the latest and most interesting topics come up. Be present at the virtual water cooler and you’ll be talked about – and linked to.
• Article directories. Submit relevant, informative articles to directories to easily multiply your links. These article directories are used by others to provide content for everything from newsletters to special reports – if your content is good, you’ll quickly become a recognized expert.
• Reciprocal links. Provide links to sites that compliment what you are offering and ask that they link to you. Similar sites that aren’t direct competitors are powerful link partners.
• Contextual links in blogs and reviews. Another instance of the power of the people – reviewers drive people to sites because they are recognized as experts, so try and get reviewed and be sure a link to your site is included. Some people won’t even know they need you until they read a great blog about you –and then they will hot-foot it to your site for more information.

If you use a good mix of link building techniques, you’ll be balancing your exposure over all of the many kinds of linking that the major search engines use so that you’re always noticed without the risk of falling down in the ranks because one particular link strategy is out of favor.

Why Consistency is Key

Many individuals start out in overdrive when they start a linking campaign. They submit to dozens of industry directories, pack their website and article directories with great content, get noticed on blogs and in reviews, set up links on complimentary sites and enjoy the fruits of their labor – top rankings.

Then something happens; they find that they just don’t have the time to continue writing articles, they stop visiting blogs because they are overwhelmed with new customers….and they stop building links or slow down considerably. Unfortunately, they discover that they are now dropping in the search engine rankings and they can’t understand it. After all, nothing’s changed, right?

Actually, that’s precisely the point – nothing is changing. If you stop actively creating links and building a following, you will fall in the rankings because your competitors are actively building links, adding content and quietly passing you in popularity. The search engines are dynamic, so you can’t afford not being dynamic yourself – you have to consistently build on what you started in order to stay ahead of the pack. It’s a long-term commitment that you have to make if you don’t want to lose in the long run.

The perfect link building campaign is a combination of balance and consistency. If you continue to spread your links out over many venues and keep the content and information flowing every month, you’ll be successful in building a valuable network of links that will send you to the top of the pages.

[tags] link building, link popularity, directories, article marketing, contextual links, forums [/tags]

Please Share This:

Once you have your website up and running, you may be shocked if, after a few months, you aren’t getting any visitors and you’re still in the dungeons of the major search engines. If you have good content, lots of SEO and a great product or service, what’s keeping you from being seen? It’s most likely your lack of links. The importance of links to your site’s placement in the most popular search engines can’t be underestimated – links tell the search engines how popular your site is with others who are on the web.

You could, of course, simply submit your site to a paid links site that promises you “thousands of links” for your site and hope that whatever they throw at the wall sticks, but that may not be your best bet. After all, search engines are increasingly savvy to how links work, and if your site has hundreds of links that aren’t really relevant to your product or service, your link popularity will probably remain quite low in the rankings. On the other hand, what help is there in having highly relevant links in limited numbers? It is this balancing act between link popularity and link relevance, or pop that is so hard to maintain. Finding the right balance is essential.

Link Popularity – The Case for and Against Numbers

Every site should try to cultivate multiple links to their site. One-way links from other sites to yours indicate that lots of people are interested in what you have to offer, and search engines do recognize this link popularity and reward it in the rankings. Reciprocal links are also a good way to increase your presence in the search rankings. With reciprocal links, you can show up in searches for your own product or service and searches for the products and services of those sites you’ve linked to.

The down side to this type of linking is that you can also be penalized in the ranks if you have hundreds of links – one-way or reciprocal – to sites that have nothing to do with your own site’s purpose. It’s why submission to paid linking services can be a bad idea – if you end up linked to sites that are too diverse or questionable in their content, you’ll drop quickly in the ranks. A site selling baby clothes linked to hundreds of baby product and care sites will do well. A baby clothes site linked to thousands of sites peddling porn, vitamins, diuretics and auto loans won’t.

How to “Pop” – Understanding the Importance of Quality

When establishing links, be industry specific – a handful of links from other sites that are focused in some way on your industry, whether it’s cleaning products, income tax preparation or natural food supplements will help pop you closer to the top in the search engines. If you make natural herbal teas, look for links to natural health and living, teas and natural cures – all inter-related topics that are relevant to what you offer.

Industry directories are also a great place to submit links that are high quality. Why? Because the larger directories are set up with complex search capabilities. Their category descriptions, Meta tags and keywords all result in highly relevant, top quality links. Because they were designed expressly to make finding particular industry information easier, a lot of time and effort has gone into the links and how they are interconnected.

Links are “graded” by the search engines based on complex algorithms that detect not only how many links there are to your site, but how relevant those links are (keep the whole diuretics/porn links problem in mind) to your own product or service. A higher relevancy score in the search engines gives you more weight based on the authority of the sites you’re linked to. Will ten incoming links from little-known sites equal one link from a site featuring recognized experts in your field? One hundred? One thousand? Or will your small cache of links from big, important sites count you out because everyone else seems to have thousands of links, relevant or not, compared to your hundreds?

The fact is, the algorithms that determine which sites are the best are evolving daily. A balance of link popularity and link “pop” is essential to being recognized by search engines and moving up through the rankings. Once you’ve achieved that status, however, you have to maintain it. That means constantly “tweaking” the links to and from your site – fine-tuning both number and relevance – in order to maintain your spot. Finding the proper balance and adjusting your Internet presence to optimize both content and links is a never-ending process that, when done properly, can place you on the front page of the best search engines.

[tags] link popularity, quality links, SEO, paid links, one-way links, reciprocal links [/tags]

Please Share This:

Text links have increasingly been the topic of discussion for websites around the globe recently. The importance of keywords and keyword phrases and direct paid links is well known. However, what many individuals don’t realize is that keywords or phrases mentioned in relation to your own site on other sites can be just as powerful in driving traffic to their site or sites, even if their site isn’t optimized for those words or phrases.

How is that possible? It’s because certain phrases are very popular and very powerful and can lead to an incredible number of links that you, the site owner, haven’t even thought about. Often, reviewers, bloggers and other sites will use a particular phrase to indicate their take on your site’s product or service and link to you. Used often enough, these text links can actually indicate to search engines that your site is the best possible answer to anyone searching for those phrases.

Good Text Links Gone Bad

One famous example of this is the phrase “miserable failure,” which, until recently, would result in a top-ranked result of “whitehouse.gov/president in Google and Yahoo searches. Google has since removed this result, but it’s an interesting example of how important it is to be seen as the expert in your field or the right result for a particular text link. Because so many people indicated on websites around the world that they felt the president was a “miserable failure,” search engines thought that the best possible site to direct searchers to was the site for the president.

A less controversial example is the Abode site, which pops up near the top of any searches for the phrase “click here.” The Adobe site isn’t optimized at all for this phrase, but so many other sites use the term “click here” in reference to Adobe that search engines assume that Adobe is the best possible site for information on the phrase “click here.” Fortunately for Adobe, “click here” has been entirely positive. Not so for the president and “miserable failure.”

Link Popularity Services Can Increase Text Link Results

A simple way to explain the importance of text links is that they are essentially votes for your site provided by the many other sites on the Internet that have a text link for your site. In the world of web popularity, text links are popularity votes that are tallied by the search engines. No matter how much you optimize your site, if you don’t have lots of relevant text links to you coming from other locations, you aren’t going to rank high in the search engines. You want to rank high for things relating to your product or service.

Link popularity services can give your site valuable insight into how you want to be presented in order to establish you as an expert in your particular industry or on a particular subject. Interestingly, you don’t have to strictly be an expert on the industry itself; in fact, being an expert on something that is a part of that field or related to that field may net you remarkable results, generating numerous text links that will draw visitors to your site.

An example would be a site that sells swimming pool and spa parts. You may find that placing yourself as an expert on swimming pool care, proper spa maintenance and how to clean and protect your pool or spa will generate tons of links from other sites. In fact, you’ll probably get more links this way than by being an expert on just swimming pool parts themselves.

Link popularity services are essential to helping a website develop a two-pronged approach to increasing text links and therefore link popularity which will drive websites up on the search engine rankings. First, a good service will help you develop a reputation as an “expert” with articles and content that will give your website clout. Second, these services should determine what truly relevant content that will generate relevant links is. After all, the swimming pool and spa parts store doesn’t need a thousand links from sites that talk about hotels with swimming pools. The magic combination is to establish text links that are relevant and diverse (from many different sites and sources). If you can find this, you will quickly establish yourself as the expert in your field and your site will move into one of the top slots in major search engine results.

[tags] text links, paid links, link popularity, link popularity services [/tags]

Please Share This: